by Tamara Babaian and Bill Schiano (April 14, 2020)
With the move to online learning, we’ve heard from many fellow educators wondering how best to execute a critical piece of what made their in-person classes so compelling—group work. For those who frequently have students work in small groups, or for those who want to start using groups to energize their class sessions, we bear good news: Group work is possible virtually thanks to online breakout rooms.
These rooms are a feature of many videoconferencing platforms, such as Zoom and Google Meet, and they enable you to move students from the central meeting room to breakout rooms for private group work, discussions, and class activities. It’s a great way to break up the monotony of watching a screen, giving students a chance to establish closer connections with each other, work intensely on focused tasks, and build momentum for discussion in the central room. In both discussion and lecture classes, breakout groups offer opportunities to engage about ideas, debate, take on a role as a team, or solve problems in a more intimate, less intimidating setting, regardless of the class size.
Even if you didn’t ordinarily use groups in traditional classroom teaching, we encourage you to try them online. This guide will help you easily implement and make the most out of online breakout rooms.
Designing Breakout Groups
If your students are not experienced with breakout meetings, consider starting with groups of two or three people. Choose assignments with predictable timing and allow a few minutes more for them than you would in a traditional classroom. Once students get more comfortable, you can scale up the size of the groups and the complexity of the assignments. We’ve found the ideal breakout group size to be between three and seven people, depending on the time, task, and students’ aptitude for the platform.
Most platforms enable you to either pre-set the team composition or generate teams automatically during the session. Independent of how you compose the groups, find a way to identify the members of each group in the central room. Depending on your platform, students could do one of the following:
- Change their screen name to include their group ID.
- Select a similar virtual background. You could assign the background, or let each group choose.
- Display a sheet of paper with their group ID.
For small classes, consider putting each student in their own, one-person breakout room. You can then communicate privately with each of them. They can share their screen, ask questions they may have been reluctant to ask in front of others, or save face as you assess their level of preparedness.
We have found that the smallest meaningful breakout requires a minimum of five to seven minutes. Even solving a simple problem requires some lead time as participants acknowledge each other’s presence and formulate a collaboratively composed solution. If deliverable material must be created, starting up the tools takes time.
Assigning Work
Virtually all kinds of group work in a physical classroom can be turned into activities for breakout rooms: discussing questions, brainstorming strategies, solving problems, or working on a long-term course project. We run breakout exercises in which groups develop written answers or formal presentations, implement techniques, and create solutions in software.
The ways you incorporate the results in the overall learning process can vary greatly. The goal might be to give participants a chance to learn and practice virtual collaboration; engage with the material more deeply and discover questions that you will answer privately or for the whole class; provide a more intimate environment for students to express their views or lead a group; or to give you, the instructor, a way to assess where individual students stand.
To begin, it’s vital for the success of the activity that you provide clear instructions for the assignment that students will work on in a breakout room. When groups have to unnecessarily deliberate what is expected, it takes precious time away from the task at hand. Instructions should be as concise as possible, but should ideally cover the following information:
- The assignment description.
- A clearly specified deliverable, including the nature and format of any output you expect, and how it will be submitted and evaluated.
- Timing; when is it due?
- A description of how deliverables will be used and clear expectations around whether you plan to share some or all of them with other groups or use them later for another activity.
- Precise locations for any materials required.
- Guidance on the process, including media for communication (audio, video and/or chat), mechanisms to balance participation, and task structure.
We recommend one additional deliverable: a list of difficulties encountered during the breakout collaboration, especially in the beginning stages of using breakouts. You may find out that students had a hard time communicating, creating a shared document, transferring control, or accessing or interpreting your instructions. Knowing about any technical or procedural difficulties that groups encountered will help you improve the experience for everyone next time. You can collect the feedback privately or have participants share it with everybody.
Display the instructions in writing in the central meeting room and ensure access to them in the breakout rooms. You may need to use another channel such as your learning management system (LMS), social media, or email. Set up each room with tools and information ready to go, to the extent your platform permits. Ask your teams to have a shared screen showing their progress always on display, so you can quickly see it when you join their room.
Before moving students to breakout rooms, ask if they have any questions about the task and the process. Resolving ambiguity will be much easier in the central room than with individual groups. Be clear about when you are sending them to the rooms, and what, if anything, they will need to do to join. Being sent to a breakout room can be disorienting; this will make the change as smooth as possible.
Student Collaboration in Breakout Rooms
Within each breakout room, beyond communicating via chat, audio, and/or video, students can share software to co-create digitally, either by displaying the work an individual group member is composing for everybody or giving other group members the ability to make changes to it, sequentially or simultaneously. Any software students use in your courses can be shared in a breakout room, from drawing and simple text editing tools to full versions of spreadsheets, word processors, presentation software, collaborative diagramming, emulators, and collaborative programming environments.
When deciding what students should use in the breakout rooms, consider their infrastructure. If they are all joining on computers with fast connections, you can push the limits in exciting and productive ways. If many of them will be on phones with slower connections, keep to more basic tools within the platform.
Communicating with Students During Breakouts
As the instructor, you can join a breakout room at any time, just as you might visit small groups in a traditional classroom. You have the same options for pedagogy in terms of how you want to use that ability, but we do suggest you check in to identify any technical issues, especially if students are new to breakout rooms. If you like to spend time with groups while they are working, breakout rooms let you do that more efficiently, so you can spend more time with them, rather than moving between them. Most platforms provide group members a way to signal to the instructor that they would like help.
In Zoom, you can broadcast a message to the breakout rooms, which is particularly useful for letting teams know when the allocated time is coming to an end. Keep messages concise, as they may only appear briefly. Implement a countdown timer in your room if your platform permits it. If not, consider setting one up in your LMS or other site and asking students to open it. Let students know if the chat in the breakout room is limited to the members of the room.
Reporting Out
Don’t feel obligated to have every group report their results every time, particularly if the reports will be time consuming. Having each team submit a deliverable will motivate students to work diligently (this is greatly simplified by using a shared cloud-based spreadsheet, word-processing document, presentation, or other deliverable material that is shared with you). Meeting time in the central room is precious—avoid repetitive reports of the same findings by multiple groups.
You and your students can quickly master virtual collaboration in the breakout room environment. Accept that some glitches are inevitable and keep open communication about what worked well and what was difficult in order to continue to improve.
Using breakout rooms, you will find your students to be more engaged when they return to the central meeting room, and you will have some valuable fodder for the remainder of your class. Not only will the students be refreshed from the change of context, they will also be poised to apply what they learned while working with each other.
