Taking a prompt from @gatewaywriting on Instagram, I’m writing today about a perfectly ordinary lesson: one that gets the job done.

I think I started to improve massively as a teacher when I realized I couldn’t do justice to a massive catalog of activities, lesson plans, and protocols: what works for me is a small, tightly-curated list of Ways We Do Business. Call them protocols, activities, “collaborates,” whatever you like–the key is that there are a handful of different ways we access new content, so we don’t have to spend all our class time practicing new way of doing things.

The perfectly ordinary lesson (protocol) I love the most lately is the jigsaw.

It’s so basic, but so, so perfect. Split a large piece of content into manageable portions, divide class into small groups, make a different student within each group the expert on each portion, allow time to become the expert, share learning with classmates. I’ve used this with nonfiction texts (split by heading), poems (split by literary device), and novels (split by critical lens or role). I sometimes have students check their learning with other like experts before presenting to their small group, and sometimes have small groups present to the entire class.

The flexibility of this lesson is apparently only matched by how useful it is in building community. I was surprised to see it come up in my break reading, as Belonging talks about the “Jigsaw Classroom” before breaking the 100-psge mark. I didn’t know about Eliot Aronson’s initial research on the approach.

In terms of student relationships in the classroom, jigsaw activities create new groupings, new norms, a sense of individual responsibility, and a feeling of belonging alongside the learning. I love the way Cohen describes it: “The power of these carefully crafted situations is that they make children full participants in the process of their own change.”

It’s one of the lesson plans that just works for me, but I love hearing the “why” behind the “what” I can observe in my classroom.