Native American Jigsaw

N A T I V E   A M E R I C A N    J I G S A W

I learned about Native Americans by learning about their history in social studies classes and college classes also. The jigsaw activity helped to expand my knowledge on Native Americans by making me brainstorm and remember previous knowledge that I already knew. Also through research on the internet, our social studies text book, and a college text book I had with Native American myths I was able to broaden my knowledge and expand on the details of the lifestyle and beliefs of the Native Americans.

This project helped to develop my content knowledge because this was a social studies project and content knowledge is specific knowledge related to social studies. By using our social studies text book and learning about the different types of knowledge (content, pedagogical, pedagogical content) I was able to further understand the different types of content and understanding which could benefit by doing the Native American jigsaw project.

 I learned from my group member through cooperative learning and by using positive interdependence where the group work together and was able to succeed because we divided the workload, had responsibility to master our individual topic, and then teach the rest of the group our topic in order for our project to be successful. I believe that nothing prevented me from gaining new knowledge because I worked extremely hard on my individual part of my project, and I worked with a great group that each contributed to the project by doing research and teaching their parts to the rest of the group.

I learned a lot about cooperative learning methods by reading the social studies textbook. I learned that it is an approach and set of strategies specifically designed to encourage student cooperation with learning. Also, it is found that students learn as well or better with cooperative learning because it gives a positive self-image, improves the attitude and acceptance of classmates, shows higher academics and increased motivation. In addition, I learned that there are four important goals with cooperative learning which I found to be very useful. Number one is positive interdependence where students work together and this provides group success because there are joint rewards, divided workload, and responsibility. Number two is positive student interaction where students individually master their topics and then teach the rest of the group. Number three is students work to develop adequate interpersonal and small group skills which is to evaluate the group skill by planning and working together. Number four is awareness of the need for group processing and this is how well the goals were accomplished; evaluate individual goals, student responsibility, and group function.