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Aronson discusses a situation in 1971 involving behavior problems at a school that had recently been integrated. After studying the situation, Aronson and his colleagues introduced the jigsaw strategy, a type of group learning experience that requires everyone's cooperative effort to finish the puzzle.

In 1971 a highly explosive situation had developed in Austin, Texas-one that has played out in many cities across the United States. Austin's public schools had recently been desegregated and, because the city had always been residentially segregated, white youngsters, African American youngsters, and Mexican-American youngsters found themselves sharing the same classroom for the first time in their lives. Within a few weeks, longstanding suspicion, fear, distrust, and antipathy among the groups produced an atmosphere of turmoil and hostility, exploding into interethnic fistfights in corridors and schoolyards across the city.

The school superintendent called me in to see if I could do anything to help students learn to get along with one another. After observing what was going on in classrooms for a few days, my graduate students and I concluded that intergroup hostility was being exacerbated by the competitive environment of the classroom.

Let me explain. In every classroom we observed, the students worked individually and competed against one another for grades. Here is a description of a typical fifth-grade classroom we observed:

The teacher stands in front of the class, asks a question, and waits for the children to indicate that they know the answer. Most frequently, six to ten youngsters raise their hands. But they do not simply raise their hands, they lift themselves a few inches off their chairs and stretch their arms as high as they can in an attempt to attract the teacher's attention. To say they are eager to be called on is an incredible understatement. Several other students sit quietly with their eyes averted, as if trying to make themselves invisible. These are the ones who don't know the answer. Understandably, they are trying to avoid eye contact with the teacher because they do not want to be called on.

When the teacher calls on one of the eager students, there are looks of disappointment, dismay, and unhappiness on the faces of the other students who were avidly raising their hands but were not called on. If the selected student comes up with the right answer, the teacher smiles, nods approvingly, and goes on to the next question. This is a great reward for the child who happens to be called on. At the same time that the fortunate student is coming up with the right answer and being smiled upon by the teacher, an audible groan can be heard coming from the children who were striving to be called on but were ignored. It is obvious they are disappointed because they missed an opportunity to show the teacher how smart and quick they are. Perhaps they will get a chance next time. In the meantime, the students who didn't know the answer breathe a sigh of relief. They have escaped being humiliated this time.

The teacher may have started the school year with a determination to treat every student equally and encourage all of them to do their best, but the students quickly sorted themselves into different groups. The "winners" were the bright, eager, highly competitive students who fervently raised their hands, participated in discussions, and did well on tests. Understandably, the teacher felt gratified that these students responded to her teaching. She praised and encouraged them, continued to call on them, and depended on them to keep the class going at a high level and at a reasonable pace.

Then there were the "losers." At the beginning, the teacher called on them occasionally, but they almost invariably didn't know the answer, were too shy to speak, or couldn't speak English well. They seemed embarrassed to be in the spotlight; some of the other students made snide comments-sometimes under their breath, occasionally out loud. Because the schools in the poorer section of town were substandard, the African American and Mexican-American youngsters had received a poorer education prior to desegregation. Consequently, in Austin it was frequently these students who were among the "losers." This tended unfairly to confirm the unflattering stereotypes that the white kids had about minorities. The "losers" were considered stupid or lazy.

The minority students also had preconceived notions about the white kids: they considered them pushy show-offs and teachers' pets. These stereotypes were seemingly confirmed by the way most of the white students behaved in the competitive classroom.

After a while, the typical classroom teacher stopped trying to engage the students who weren't doing well. She or he felt it was kinder not to call on them and expose them to ridicule by the other students. In effect, a silent pact was made with the losers: to leave them alone as long as they weren't disruptive. Without really meaning to, the teacher gave up on these students-and so did the rest of the class. Without really meaning to, the teacher contributed to the difficulty the students were experiencing. After a while, these students tended to give up on themselves as well-perhaps believing that they were stupidbecause they sure weren't getting it.

It required only a few days of intensive observation and interviews for us to have a pretty good idea of what was going on in these classrooms. We realized we needed to do something drastic to shift the emphasis from a relentlessly competitive atmosphere to a more cooperative one. It was in this context that we invented the jigsaw strategy.

THE JIGSAW CLASSROOM

Jigsaw is a specific type of group learning experience that requires everyone's cooperative effort to produce the final product. Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece-each student's part-is essential for the production and full understanding of the final product. If each student's part is essential, then each student is essential. That is precisely what makes this strategy so effective.

Here's how it works. The students in a history class, for example, are divided into small groups of five or six students each. Suppose their task is to learn about World War II. In one jigsaw group, let us say that Sara is responsible for researching Hitler's rise to power in prewar Germany. Another member of the group, Steven, is assigned to cover concentration camps; Pedro is assigned Britain's role in the war; Lin is to research the contribution of the Soviet Union; Babu will handle Japan's entry into the war; and Monique will read about the development of the atom bomb. Eventually each student will come back to her or his jigsaw group and will try to present a vivid, interesting, well-organized report to the group. The situation is specifically structured so that the only access any member has to the other five assignments is by listening intently to the report of the person reciting. Thus, if Babu doesn't like Pedro or he thinks Sara is a nerd, if he heckles them or tunes out while they are reporting, he cannot possibly do well on the test that follows.

To increase the probability that each report will be factual and accurate, the students doing the research do not immediately take it back to their jigsaw group. After completing their research, they must first meet with the students from each of the jigsaw groups who had the identical assignment. For example, those students assigned to the atom bomb topic meet together to work as a team of specialists, gathering information, discussing ideas, becoming experts on their topic, and rehearsing their presentations. This is called the "expert" group. It is particularly useful for those students who might have initial difficulty learning or organizing their part of the assignment for it allows them to benefit from listening to and rehearsing with other "experts," to pick up strategies of presentation, and generally to bring themselves up to speed.

After this meeting, when each presenter is up to speed, the jigsaw groups reconvene in their initial heterogeneous configuration. The atom bomb expert in each group teaches the other group members what she or he has learned about the development of the atom bomb. Each student in each group educates the whole group about her or his specialty. Students are then tested on what they have learned from their fellow group members about World War II.

What is the benefit of the jigsaw classroom? First and foremost it is a remarkably efficient way to learn the material. But even more important, the jigsaw process encourages listening, engagement, and empathy by giving each member of the group an essential part to play in the academic activity Group members must work together as a team to accomplish a common goal-each person depends on all the others. No student can achieve her or his individual goal (learning the material, getting a good grade) unless everyone works together as a team. Group goals and individual goals complement and bolster each other. This "cooperation by design" facilitates interaction among all students in the class, leading them to value one another as contributors to their common task.

Our first intervention was with fifth graders. First we helped several fifth-grade teachers devise a cooperative jigsaw structure for the students to learn about the life of Eleanor Roosevelt. We divided the students into small groups-diversified in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender-and made each student responsible for a certain portion of Roosevelt's biography. Needless to say, at least one or two of the students in each group were already viewed as losers by their classmates.

Carlos was one such student. Carlos was very shy and felt insecure in his new surroundings. English was his second language. He spoke it quite well but with a slight accent. Try to imagine his experience: After attending an inadequately funded, substandard neighborhood school consisting entirely of Mexican-American students like himself, he was suddenly bussed across town to the middle-class area of the city and catapulted into a class with Anglo students who spoke English fluently and seemed to know much more than he did about all the subjects taught in the school-and were not reluctant to let him know it.

When we restructured the classroom so that students were now working together in small groups, this was terrifying to Carlos at first. He could no longer slink down in his chair and hide in the back of the room. The jigsaw structure made it necessary for him to speak up when it was his turn to recite. Carlos gained a little confidence by rehearsing with the others who were also studying Roosevelt's work with the United Nations, but he was understandably reticent when it was his turn to teach the students in his jigsaw group. He blushed, stammered, and had difficulty articulating the material he had learned. Skilled in the ways of the competitive classroom, the other students were quick to pounce on Carlos' weakness and began to ridicule him.

One of my research assistants was observing that group and heard some of its members make comments such as, "Aw, you don't know it, you're dumb, you're stupid. You don't know what you're doing. You can't even speak English." Instead of admonishing them to "be nice" or "try to cooperate," she made one simple but powerful statement. It went something like this: "Talking like that to Carlos might be fun for you to do, but it's not going to help you learn anything about what Eleanor Roosevelt accomplished at the United Nations-and the exam will be given in about fifteen minutes." What my assistant was doing was reminding the students that the situation had changed. The same behavior that might have seemed useful to them in the past, when they were competing against each other, was now going to cost them something very important: the chance to do well on the upcoming exam.

Old, dysfunctional habits do not die easily, but they do die. Within a few days of working with jigsaw, Carlos' groupmates gradually realized that they needed to change their tactics. It was no longer in their own best interest to rattle Carlos; he wasn't the enemy-he was on their team. They needed him to perform well in order to do well themselves. Instead of taunting him and putting him down, they started to gently ask him questions. The other students began to put themselves in Carlos' shoes so they could ask questions that didn't threaten him and would help him recite what he knew in a clear and understandable manner.

After a week or two, most of Carlos' groupmates had developed into skillful interviewers, asking him relevant questions to elicit the vital information from him. They became more patient, figured out the most effective way to work with him, helped him out, and encouraged him. The more they encouraged Carlos, the more he was able to relax; the more he was able to relax, the quicker and more articulate he became. Carlos' groupmates began to see him in a new light. He became transformed in their minds from a "know-nothing loser who can't even speak English" to someone they could work with, someone they could appreciate, maybe even someone they could like.

Moreover, Carlos began to see himself in a new light: as a competent, contributing member of the class who could work with others from different ethnic groups. His self-esteem grew, and as it grew his performance improved even more; and as his performance continued to improve, his groupmates continued to view him in a more and more favorable light.

Within a few weeks, the success of the jigsaw was obvious to the classroom teachers. They spontaneously told us of their great satisfaction over the way the atmosphere of their classrooms had been transformed. Adjunct visitors (such as music teachers and the like) were little short of amazed at the dramatically changed atmosphere in the classrooms. Needless to say, this was exciting to my graduate students and me. But, as scientists, we were not totally satisfied; we were seeking firmer, more objective evidence-and we got it.

Because we had randomly introduced the jigsaw intervention into some classrooms and not others, we were able to compare the progress of the jigsaw students with that of the students in traditional classrooms in a precise, scientific manner. After only eight weeks there were clear differences, even though students spent only a small portion of their classtime in jigsaw groups. When tested objectively, jigsaw students expressed significantly less prejudice and negative stereotyping, showed more self-confidence, and reported that they liked school better than children in traditional classrooms.

Moreover, this self-report was bolstered by hard behavioral data. For example, the students in jigsaw classrooms were absent less often than those in traditional classrooms. In addition, the jigsaw students from poorer neighborhoods showed enormous academic improvement over the course of eight weeks; they scored significantly higher on objective exams than the poorer students in traditional classes, while those students who were already doing well continued to do well-as well as their counterparts in traditional classes.

JIGSAW AND BASKETBALL

You might have noticed a rough similarity between the kind of cooperation that goes on in a jigsaw group and the kind of cooperation that is necessary for the smooth functioning of an athletic team. Take a basketball team, for example. If the team is to be successful, each player must play her or his role in a cooperative manner. If each player is hellbent on being the highest scorer on the team, then each will shoot whenever the opportunity arises.

In contrast, on a cooperative team, the idea is to pass the ball crisply until one player manages to break clear for a relatively easy shot. If I pass the ball to Sam, and Sam whips a pass to Jameel, and Jameel passes to Tony, who breaks free for an easy lay-up, I'm elated even though I didn't receive credit for either a field goal or an assist. This is true cooperation.

As a result of this cooperation, athletic teams frequently build a cohesiveness that extends to their relationship off the court. They become friends because they have learned to count on one another. There is one difference between the outcome of a typical jigsaw group and that of a typical high-school basketball team, however, and it is a crucial difference. In high school, athletes tend to hang out with each other and frequently exclude nonathletes from their circle of close friends. In short, the internal cohesiveness of an athletic team often goes along with the exclusion of everyone else.

In the jigsaw classroom, we circumvented this problem by the simple device of shuffling groups every eight weeks. Once a group of students was functioning well together-once the barriers had been broken down and the students showed a great deal of liking and empathy for one another-we would re-form the groupings. At first the students would resist this re-forming of groups. Picture the scene: Debbie, Carlos, Tim, Patty, and Jacob have just gotten to know and appreciate one another and they are doing incredibly good work as a team. Why should they want to leave this warm, efficient, and cozy group to join a group of relative strangers?

Why, indeed? After spending a few weeks in the new group, the students invariably discover that the new people are just about as interesting, friendly, and wonderful as their former group. The new group is working well together and new friendships form. Then the students move on to their third group, and the same thing begins to happen. As they near the end of their time in the third group, it begins to dawn on most students that they didn't just luck out and land in groups with four or five terrific people. Rather, they realize that just about everyone they work with is a good human being. All they need to do is pay attention to each person, to try to understand her or him, and good things will emerge. That is a lesson well worth learning.

ENCOURAGING GENERAL EMPATHY

Students in the jigsaw classroom become adept at empathy. When we watch a movie, empathy is what brings tears or joy in us when sad or happy things happen to a character. But why should we care about a character in a movie? We care because we have learned to feel and experience what that character experiences-as if it were happening to us. Most of us don't experience empathy for our sworn enemies. So most moviegoers watching Star Wars, for example, will cheer wildly when the Evil Empire's spaceships are blown to smithereens. Who cares what happens to Darth Vader's followers.

Is empathy a trait we are born with or is it something we learn? I believe we are born with the capacity to feel for others. It is part of what makes us human. I also believe that empathy is a still that can be enhanced with practice. If I am correct, then it should follow that working in jigsaw groups would lead to a sharpening of a youngster's general empathic ability, because to do well in the group the child needs to practice feeling what her or his groupmates feel.

To test this notion, one of my graduate students, Diane Bridgeman, conducted a clever experiment in which she showed a series of cartoons to ten-year-old children. Half of the children had spent two months participating in jigsaw classes; the others had spent that time in traditional classrooms. In one series of cartoons, a little boy is looking sad as he waves goodbye to his father at the airport. In the next frame, a letter carrier delivers a package to the boy. When the boy opens the package and finds a toy airplane inside, he bursts into tears. Diane asked the children why they thought the little boy burst into tears at the sight of the airplane. Nearly all of the children could answer correctly: because the toy airplane reminded him of how much he missed his father.

Then Diane asked the crucial question: "What did the letter carrier think when he saw the boy open the package and start to cry?" Most children of this age make a consistent error: they assume that everyone knows what they know Thus, the youngsters in the control group thought the letter carrier would know the boy was sad because the gift reminded him of his father leaving.

But the children who had participated in the jigsaw classroom responded differently They were better able to take the perspective of the letter carrier-to put themselves in his shoes. They realized that he would be confused at seeing the boy cry over receiving a nice present because the letter carrier hadn't witnessed the farewell scene at the airport. Offhand, this might not seem very important. After all, who cares whether kids have the ability to figure out what is in the letter carrier's mind? In point of fact, we should all care-a great deal.

Here's why: the extent to which children can develop the ability to see the world from the perspective of another human being has profound implications for empathy, prejudice, aggression, and interpersonal relations in general. When you can feel another person's pain, when you can develop the ability to understand what that person is going through, it increases the probability that your heart will open to that person. Once your heart opens to another person, it becomes virtually impossible to bully that other person, to taunt that other person, to humiliate that other person-and certainly to kill that other person. If you develop the general ability to empathize, then your desire to bully or taunt anyone will decrease. Such is the power of empathy.

This isn't a new idea. We see it, for example, in William Wharton's provocative novel Birdy. One of the protagonists, Alphonso, a sergeant in the army, takes an immediate dislike for an overweight enlisted man, a clerk typist named Ronsky There are a great many things that Alphonso dislikes about Ronsky. At the top of his list is Ronsky's annoying habit of continually spitting-he spits all over his desk, his typewriter, and anyone who happens to be in the vicinity Alphonso cannot stand the guy and has fantasies of punching him out. Several weeks after meeting him, Alphonso learns that Ronsky had earlier taken part in the Normandy invasion and had watched in horror as several of his buddies were cut down before they even had a chance to hit the beach. It seems that his constant spitting was a concrete manifestation of his attempt to get the bad taste out of his mouth. Upon learning this, Alphonso sees his former enemy in an entirely different light. He sighs with regret and says to himself, "Before you know it, if you're not careful, you can get to feeling for everybody and there's nobody left to hate."

WHO CAN BENEFIT?

We now have almost thirty years of scientific research demonstrating that carefully structured cooperative learning strategies are effective. Students learn material as well as, or better than, students in traditional classrooms. The data also show that through cooperative learning the classroom becomes a positive social atmosphere where students learn to like and respect one another and where taunting and bullying are sharply reduced. Students involved in jigsaw tell us that they enjoy school more and show us that they do by attending class more regularly

It goes without saying that the scientific results are important. But on a personal level, what is perhaps even more gratifying is to witness, firsthand, youngsters actually going through the transformation. Tormentors evolve into supportive helpers and anxious "losers" begin to enjoy learning and feel accepted for who they are.

The jigsaw classroom has shown us the way to encourge children to become more compassionate and empathic toward one another. Accordingly, it stands to reason that this technique could provide a simple, inexpensive, yet ideal solution to the recent epidemic of school shootings that is plaguing the United States.

However, it can be misleading to suggest that jigsaw sessions always go smoothly There are always problems, but most can be prevented or minimized. And I don't mean to imply that competition, in and of itself, is evil; it isn't. But, at any age, a general atmosphere of exclusion that is ruthless and relentless is unpleasant at best and dangerous at worst.

The poet W H. Auden wrote, "We must love one another or die." It is a powerful statement, but perhaps too powerful. Ideally, it's best to bring people together in cooperative situations before animosities develop. In my judgment, however, although loving one another is very nice, it isn't essential. What is essential is that we learn to respect one another and to feel empathy and compassion for one another-even those who seem very different from us in race, ethnicity, interests, appearance, and so on.

In Austin our goal was to reduce the bigotry, suspicion, and negative racial stereotyping that was rampant among the city's public school students. We didn't try to persuade students with rational or moral arguments, nor did we declare National Brotherhood Week. Such direct strategies have proven notoriously ineffective when it comes to changing deep-seated emotional attitudes of any kind.

Rather, we engaged the scientifically proven mechanism of self-persuasion: we placed students in a situation where the only way they could hope to survive was to work with and appreciate the qualities of others who were previously disliked. Self-interest may not be the prettiest of motives for changing behavior, but it is an opening-and an open door is better than one that is bolted shut.