Jigsaw Lesson Plan Analysis: The Living Spreadsheet This lesson plan was more focused on explaining how

to use the instructional model than on the lesson itself. There were two example lessons given, The Civil War and U.S. Presidents, and I am going to focus on The Civil War for this analysis. The instructional strategy this teacher uses is what she calls the living worksheet which she describes as a method that improves upon jigsaws and provides students with active learning. In this model, the students conduct their own preliminary research of the topic, then they come together and make a living spread sheet representing their topic. The students have to work together and communicate to figure out where everyone goes and how their subtopics relate to each other. I really like how this teacher modified jigsaw because she maintains the best parts of the model and makes it even better. The aspects of jigsaw that the teacher keeps are: content, research, and group work. Like jigsaw, the living spread sheet also covers topics that contain subsections that can be divided among the students. This variation of jigsaw also teaches the students research and communication skills. The living spreadsheet also utilizes group work like jigsaw, albeit, in a different way. The aspects of the living spreadsheet that are different from jigsaw are the formation of groups. In this variation of jigsaw, the students do not have different expert groups or peer-instruction groups, rather, each students has his or her own subtopic and the whole class comes together to evaluate the information. For example, using this model with the civil war, the students would all have different battle to research. When they come together in class for the living spreadsheet, they would be able to form relationships and conclusions easily by looking at their positions on the spreadsheet.