Zoom Breakout Rooms

Overview

Breakout rooms allow faculty to seamlessly split a Zoom meeting into separate sessions for small group discussion and collaboration and then bring those sessions back together to resume the large group meeting. As the meeting host, you can automatically or manually group participants into these separate sessions before or during a session. Follow these steps to create and implement Breakout Rooms successfully.

Video Tutorial

Step 1:

Create the lesson or activity you will use with the breakout rooms. Here are some recommendations.

• Active Learning for Your Online Classroom: Five Strategies Using Zoom
• Active Learning in Zoom
• Structuring Short-Term Group Work Online, With Zoom (v5.3.0) Breakout Rooms
• 13 Zoom Breakout Room Ideas
• Teaching: How to Make Breakout Rooms Work Better
  
• Six Ways to Use Breakout Rooms to Teach English Online
  
  

Step 2: Enable Breakout Rooms

1. Log in to your Saint Leo Zoom account.
2. From the menu setting, scroll down to Breakout room and make sure it is turned on.

Step 3: (Optional)

Step 4: Begin class and manage breakout rooms

1. Before starting breakout rooms, you will want to:
   
   • Review expectations for what should happen in the breakout rooms
   • Practice using breakout rooms with a few colleagues before using it in class
   • Assign roles to each student
   • Require each group to produce something
2. Manage breakout rooms
   • Allow your students to share their screen in breakout rooms by adjusting the settings in the main meeting.
   • Monitor groups
     

Recommendations

• Ensure breakout room are enabled in your Zoom account.
• Preassign groups before class starts.
• Assign clear instructions to students before sending them to their breakout rooms
  
  • Assign roles to students
  • Have them work on a collaborative document or the Zoom whiteboard together.
  • Require each group to produce something. They should have an answer to a question or a solution to a problem to bring back to the main group
• Allow your students to share their screen in breakout rooms by adjusting the settings in the main meeting.
• Monitor the groups
• Use the new Zoom whiteboard in breakout rooms.  
• Define your community norms/expectations (digital citizenship rules)  
• Build community first.  Start with a low stakes collaborative activity to build relationships and establish norms 
• Keep groups stable for at least 4 weeks (depending on class size; the larger the class, the more important is small group stability 
• Have clear goals, outcomes, products, and directions 
• (ex. Each person share first impression/finding from the reading, task, article, etc.) 
• First person to respond – alphabetical order by first name; reverse order, by birthday, etc. 
• Check for understanding before going to breakout rooms; have students check yes/no in response area 
• Provide a template (Google doc; OneDrive document; slide for group; Padlet, etc.) for group product; you can monitor these in process; if you create them, there will be no need for submissions.  Each student puts his/her initials next to their contributions 
• Have groups prepare a summary slide of their room/session/work 
• Assign roles each week: 
  • Facilitator 
  • Collaborative note-manager (One Drive, Google Doc) 
  • Summary Slide Sleuth -creates the summary slide and shares with class 
  • Timekeeper