Breakout rooms allow you to divide a larger online class into smaller groups so participants can work together on discussions, activities, and team-building exercises. They are one of the simplest ways to make virtual training more interactive and can be used effectively in platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
If you are teaching or training online and want to continue running team activities and games, do not worry. You can easily run virtual team-building activities and games in online classrooms pretty much the same as you would offline.
All you need to do is use what are called ‘ Breakout Rooms’, and in this post, I will explain how to use breakout rooms for team-building activities when teaching online.
If you deliver employee training online, breakout rooms are especially useful for running small-group discussions, icebreakers, and team-building activities.
Looking for managing remote and virtual teams training materials? We offer ready-to-use training materials to help managers lead remote employees more effectively.
How To Use Breakout Rooms for Team Building Activities
It is surprisingly easy to use Breakout Rooms, and Zoom is arguably one of the best video conferencing options available online, and is one of the most commonly used by online teachers and trainers.
Note: If you are using Microsoft Teams, Skype, or another video conferencing platform, the process is fairly similar.
1. What Are Breakout Rooms?
A breakout room is a virtual space, so you can split up your online classes and send them into smaller classrooms in groups. You can create as many breakout rooms as you want.
So imagine that you have 24 students or participants in your virtual class and that you want them to do an activity in groups of 6.
You will create 4 breakout rooms, and you can do this before the class, so that these breakout rooms already exist. You might call them rooms One, Two, Three, and Four, or you can call them whatever you want.
When it is time to do a group activity, you simply send the students off to their breakout room, and so, in each room, they will discuss and do the activity, task, or game in their group (of six in this example).
So in essence, you can run your training sessions, workshops, or online classes exactly the way you would offline, for the most part, when it comes to activities such as icebreakers and team-building games.
As the host (teacher), you can hop into and see any of the breakout rooms at any time.
You can also choose when to bring all of the participants back to the main online classroom.
2. How Do You Set Up a Breakout Room?
To set up a breakout room in Zoom, you first need to have Zoom installed and be familiar with the basic meeting controls.
Note that to set up the Breakout rooms, you will need to be the account holder or have the full admin privileges for the Zoom account you are using to run the class.
You can create up to 50 breakout rooms, so this is more than you are ever likely to really need, and you can have up to 500 participants in one room.
To set up Breakout rooms, take a quick look at this video.
3. Zoom Breakout FAQs
I get asked some questions a lot, and so below are the answers to these questions:
What if someone joins the class late, and students are already in breakout rooms?
It is not a problem at all. You can either pre-assign people to a breakout room before the class starts, or you can assign the option for Zoom to randomly allocate students to a breakout room.
How do I allocate students to a breakout room?
You can either allocate students to breakout rooms beforehand or during the lessons. Beforehand, I am sure you would agree, is generally the best option.
To pre-assign, go to ‘Meetings’ –> ‘Schedule a Meeting‘.
In the Breakout room setting, you can select to automatically assign students (Zoom calls them ‘participants’) to be allocated.
This can be a great choice that will save you work, and then it will mean that your students are randomly allocated to a breakout room.
Can I use Breakout Rooms in Skype or MS Teams rather than in Zoom?
Yes. Microsoft Teams now has a breakout rooms feature, making it a good solution for offering online training activities.
Simply prepare the activity and group instructions, choose group sizes, then assign participants to rooms, monitor the progress as the activity proceeds, and then finally, bring everyone back to the main session for feedback.
Breakout rooms are also available in platforms such as Webex and Adobe Connect, although the exact setup steps vary by platform.
4. How Can Trainers Use Breakout Rooms for Activities?
You can put your students into mini and temporary virtual rooms so that they talk in their own groups. It’s an extremely useful feature these days on Zoom and the other two platforms mentioned above!
So what next, you might ask? How do you, for example, run one of the FREE training activities on this site or the team building and course activities that come with the off-the-shelf training course materials?
Or you might have your own activities that you often use. Good question.
Step A – Make Sure Students Have Files Beforehand
If the activity involves a set of questions (such as the FREE Communications Quiz Activity), I recommend sending the document by email or making it available to download online for the students and participants beforehand.
Ideally, the students will not have read the tasks beforehand. So, including a cover and including a few other things, such as online classroom etiquette, can make for a good document to send them.
Providing participants (students) with an agenda beforehand is always a great idea for online teaching, so you might decide to include the activity details at the back of the agenda document.
We include these files in our students’ handbooks and/or as a separate file in our training course materials packages (see the What’s Included Page).
Step B – Make Use of These Online Teaching Tools
>> We have written a detailed post on the Best Online Tutoring Tools You Can Use, and you can read it here. So you might find that really useful! 🙂
Step C – Use Activities Designed for Online Teaching
There are tons of icebreakers, team building, and other group activities you can do online, and we have listed 21 FREE-to-use icebreakers and team-building games. See our post
The 21 activities above can all be used in virtual classrooms!
Step D – Allowing More Time Online for Responses
One tip worth mentioning is that you will need to approach how you teach online slightly differently from in a real-life classroom, in that you will need to allow participants more time.
Tip 1: Online, I have found that it can take slightly longer for someone to respond or to react. Allow slightly more time when using activities in online teaching, and be ready to unmute them if they have a question (if they are on mute) while you are speaking.
Tip 2: Allocate an extra 5 – 10 minutes the first time you use activities with a certain group of participants, as they may need some guidance the first time they use these technologies and tools.
Be patient when starting, and you will find over time that you can easily include activities in your online classes!
5. What Group Size Works Best in Breakout Rooms?
When allocating participants who need to work together into breakout rooms when teaching online, you have two main options.
i) Auto-Randomly Allocate Participants to a Breakout Room Before Each Activity
If you will need to sometimes have participants work in pairs and then in groups of 4 and then maybe 12 people (in other words, the size of the breakout rooms will change for different activities), you might as well automatically let the program, such as Zoom, randomly allocate participants to a room.
Adding new rooms as you teach is technically possible to do, but it can be messy, especially if you need to focus on teaching at the same time.
ii) Allocate Participants to a Breakout Room Before the Class and Keep Group Sizes the Same for All Activities
It is more practical to keep the rooms all the same size, rather than switching between rooms of 2 and 4 people if you want to pre-allocate participants to breakout rooms.
Groups of 4 can be a good number for most virtual classroom activities and games.
So you will want to either automatically randomly put participants in breakout rooms before each activity, or prepare the breakout rooms before you start teaching each session, and pre-allocate users to a breakout room.
If you use this option, though, then the easiest way is to keep all group sizes the same, i.e., 4 people in each room for each activity.
Interested in more articles from our remote and hybrid teams guides?
The Challenge of Using Team Building Activities in Virtual Classrooms
When teaching online, your students are even more isolated than normal, and thus, using group activities becomes even more relevant than ever.
As a teacher, freelance, or corporate trainer, I am sure you already appreciate the benefits when it comes to pedagogy (teaching methods) of making classes interactive and getting students engaged with the learning.
Team-building games, icebreakers, and other activities help participants to:
- learn in different ways
- engage on a social level with their fellow students (and this makes learning most enjoyable and productive)
- break up what otherwise might be a one-sided training session or lesson with just the teacher/trainer speaking non-stop.
Online, the challenge is how to physically, as it were, put students into small groups to work on group tasks? How exactly does this work in an online virtual classroom setting? Is it even possible?
YES is the answer, and one of the very best examples and most commonly used ways to achieve holding group activities online is using what is known as ‘Breakout rooms’.
If you found this post on how to use breakout rooms for team building activities useful, then please also take a look at the customizable training materials we sell below:
