Zoom Breakout Rooms for Collaboration

I personally feel like the ONE worst aspect of online learning is that the kids are missing the social interaction and collaborative learning structures they so desperately need.  As we know, students learn the best when they are working collaboratively in highly structured groups.  This has been especially hard for me as a teacher, because I live and breath Kagan cooperative learning structures in my classroom on a daily basis and have truly seen the growth in my students both academically and socially over the years that I have implemented Kagan into my classroom.

So today I'm going to talk about Breakout Rooms on Zoom! It doesn't fully replace in person collaboration of course, but it's a really good option to support our kiddos talk time, during this period of online learning. Let's get started!

How to Train Your Students on Breakout Rooms

Well just like with live in-classroom instruction, you can't just throw kids into groups and expect them to work together successfully.  You want start with some fun, non-academic teaam building activites that they can do in their groups to get to know each other.  This is important for helping them build relationships with one another so that they will feel comfortable talking and sharing with each other.  I would suggest starting small and having them work with pairs for a while before moving into largers groups. Also modeling how to discuss with a partner and providing them with response frames/stems will help them verbalize their thoughts into words.

Next, you want to set clear expections so they know what is expected of them.  I display this slide every day before our first breakout room of the day (they need lots of reminders.. lol)

Most importantly, once you send them to their Breakout Rooms, you want to pop in and out of as many rooms as possible and help reinforce those breakout room expectations.  Once they know you'll always be popping in to check on them, they are much more likely to do what they are supposed to do! This is also a great way for you to observe your students and evaluate their strenths and weaknesses.

Tips and Tricks!

So now how do you go about setting up these Breakout Rooms?? 

So once youre logged into your Zoom meeting with your class, you want to click the  breakout room button on the bottom of your Zoom toolbar (be sure you have enabled this option in your Zoom settings).  Now, you can select to create the groups automatically or manually. If you want them in pairs and you have 28 students, you will select to create 14 groups.  If you want them in groups of 4 you would select to make 7 groups. 

As it sounds, "automatically" means it will randomly group the students together, whereas "manually" allows you to group them as you'd like. I would suggest selecting manually and creating your groups intentinally and specificially.  However, there is often a time and place for the automatic option as well.  Once my kids are all logged onto Zoom in the morning, while they are working on iReady, discussing the morning circle topic, or another independent task, I quickly create those breakout rooms manually and then they are set for the day! As kids join or leave the meeting, you can choose to swap or move kids to other rooms, rearranging as you see fit!

Under the "Options" dropdown, when you select the time for the Breakout Room, I would aim to keep it around 5-8 minutes or so, just having them discuss one or just a couple of questions.  As mentioned before, always making sure you are popping in and out of the Breakout Rooms to support, and reinforce your rules.  You can also adjust the amount of time you want them to have once the timer is up.  I usually set mine for 15 seconds so that we don't have to wait for kiddos to be dumped back into the main room.  I do however "broadcast" a message warning them how much time they have left. 

You can end the breakout rooms at any time as well, you just click the red button that says "close all rooms." You do not have to wait until the timer is up.  Likewise when the timer is up for the Breakout Rooms, a notification will pop up asking you if you want to end them or keep them open.  So they don't have to automatically end just becasue the time is up.  You have control over that. Aditionally, if there are kids who you dont want to put in a breakout room, you just simply don't assign them to a room and they will then remain in the main room with you.

I hold the kids accountable by letting them know I'll use the random selector to have them share out after they've had the time to discuss the question in their breakout rooms.  Also, usually whatever they are working on with their partner/group in the breakout room is something they are also typing and submitting to me in some form or another.  This ensures that I can monitor they are all working and participating.

If the students have a question while in their Breakout Room, they have the option to click "ask for help."  This picture to the left shows you what it looks from from the students view of the Breakout Room.  

You will then get a notification that looks like this image below here.        

So these are the basics to help you get started setting up Zoom Breakout Rooms with your students.  I truly feel that students need this interaction with one another for so many different reasons.  They really need the social interaction with each other.  Our English Learners as well as ALL learners need to get their "talk time" in throughout the day.  Research has also proven that kids learn better when they are working collaboratively with their peers.  The Breakout Rooms option in Zoom really does provide us with that missing piece of social interaction and collaboration that these kids are so vitally missing with online instruction! I hope this helps!

Virtually Learning,

Megan Brown

megan.brown@omsd.net