Manage your Zoom breakout room effectively

Breakout rooms can be very effective spaces for student group collaboration, provided that students have explicit instructions. Planning is required to ensure students participate in structured, focused and productive discussions and activities. Here are some things to consider before you conduct a breakout room activity:

• Determine whether breakout rooms would prove useful for your session by taking into consideration the time available, possible activities and your class size.
• Consider the size of the groups, activities and duration of the breakout rooms. Recommended group size should be between two and five to ensure everyone has a chance to contribute.
• Think about your role as the instructor – periodically join each breakout room to monitor discussions and to stimulate discussion if groups are having difficulties. 
• Prior to them leaving your main room, provide students with a Google Doc with a clear plan for them to follow when they enter breakout rooms (eg. “In this 15 minute breakout session, spend 5 minutes discussing ideas; you will have 5 minutes to discuss problems with a tutor when they join your breakout room; finish by spending the last 5 minutes coming up with a solution; note your solutions in the space below”).
• Consider assigning roles to group members to help with organisation. Rotate these roles around each time you start breakout rooms. For example, in a project based learning task, these roles could be a project manager, designer, analyst and developer. More general roles could include discussion leader, library/database/Google researcher, note taker and findings presenter.
• Consider providing some icebreaker activities in the instructions to students to get them started (eg. ask them to begin by introducing themselves and to tell each other 1 thing they have learned or found particularly useful from the tutorial so far).

Once you have started your breakout rooms you can monitor and engage with students with techniques similar to those you would use during face-to-face classes, such as by joining each breakout room in turn.

• Ensure students have continued access to activity instructions, discussion prompts and relevant learning materials while they are in a breakout room (via a Google Doc, downloadable Word document, shared OneNote notebook, or a page in Canvas or UTSOnline) as without these group activities will not be productive.
• You can manually move between breakout rooms to check student progress by clicking the ‘Join’ text in your breakout rooms list: 
  
• Broadcast a message to all breakout rooms to update students with relevant information, or remind them about their task
  
• Students can use the ’ask for help’ button in their breakout room to alert you that they need assistance.
  
• If you set an automatic time limit for the breakout rooms during setup, participants will see a countdown 60 seconds before the room closes. Alternatively, you can broadcast a two-minute warning to all groups letting students know it’s time to wrap up. Then, one minute later, manually close the groups. Zoom will then give participants one minute to leave breakout rooms and come back to the main room.
  

Once a breakout room session has ended, students should always be asked to report to the main meeting room by giving feedback, summarising their discussion or presenting their work (ideally by a nominated speaker in the group). This can be done in a number of ways:

Verbal response

A verbal response requires minimal set up time. Remember to explain to students what exactly they should talk about  and how long you expect them to talk for.

Chat response

When in a breakout room, only the students in that room are able to see anything typed in the chat. This makes it a good tool for summarising the group’s ideas.  Ask a student to save or copy the chat prior to leaving the breakout room so they can share it with the class in the main room.

Collaborative Documents

If you have provided the class with a collaborative Google Doc, OneNote workbook or editable page in Canvas or UTSOnline wiki page, you can ask students to give feedback or respond directly to questions in one of those spaces. This provides a space to capture each group’s responses in one accessible location. It also allows all participants to contribute to a single document simultaneously. Such co-constructed documents enable students to add tables, images, and links. Students will be able to access the contributions at any time and refer back to them during revision and assessment preparation.

Summarising and Weaving

To end a breakout room session, use summarising techniques to wrap up the key points that have arisen from a discussion and/or give feedback on presentations and ideas. You can also identify and weave together themes that have emerged from the discussions and students’ feedback, and highlight areas that escaped their attention. If their discussion points need elaboration, help students to identify gaps and guide them towards learning materials that can add depth to their understandings and responses.

The LX.lab has created this template to help you plan how you will provide instructions to students before they leave the main meeting room, how you will guide them during the breakout room session, and how they will give feedback to the main meeting room after the breakout session has ended.

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Zoom-breakout-room-template
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