1) Provide clear instructions on what you'd like students to do in breakout rooms, before they go in. 

Students can lose track of instructions that are only verbal, especially when moving to breakout rooms takes away any slides you may have provided to back up your directions. Providing clear, persistent, and structured instructions can help them stay on track and accomplish the tasks you want them to complete. Try sharing a Google Doc with the whole class that holds the prompts and instructions before sending them to breakout rooms, and be clear about the purpose of the task you want them to complete. You could ask students to use the Google doc as a note-taking tool as well, in which you designate space under each question for each group to provide their answers. If you have a large class, make sure you specify a secretary, in each group, so you don’t have more than 50 people trying to edit the Doc at once! 

It’s also important to share tutorials and how-tos on how students can use the Zoom features, such as screen sharing, Zoom chat, whiteboard and annotation tools, and how to use the “Ask for Help” button in the controls to call you or a GSI to join their rooms if needed. Remember that many of your students are just as new to Zoom as you are, and just as overloaded learning new tools right now.

2) Assign roles to support equitable participation

While this may seem too restrictive, assigning specific roles at random or asking students to pick one at the start of the breakout activity can go a long way toward fostering participation. Clear roles can help facilitate the conversation among them, support equitable work loads, and distribute responsibilities for the activity’s success in a way that encourages collaborative work. For example, you might include roles such as, a reporter to share out coherent conclusions after coming back to the main room, a note-taker to take running notes in the Google doc, a facilitator who can keep the discussion moving and bring up the assignment prompts you provide, and a time-keeper to keep track of time. 

3) Visit the rooms and monitor group discussions

Similar to what you usually do as you move around the room during face-to-face class discussion, you or your GSI’s can circulate among the rooms to drop in on student conversations and answer their questions while the rooms are open. Your presence in the room is important even if they don’t request your help. It allows you to gauge where the students are in their understanding of the materials and provide feedback to keep them on track in the activity. You could also monitor the work of all of the groups by reading their notes in the shared Google doc that students add in real-time. 

4) Set up the same small groups for multiple sessions, if possible

Creating new groups manually every class session can be time-consuming, especially if you have a large class, and that time will be lost from the activity itself. Zoom allows you to use the same groups multiple times during a meeting, and also to set up the same groups in advance for multiple sessions, via a file upload. In addition to saving time, relatively stable groups will help students get to know each other and work together more smoothly over time. That said, of course, consider the objectives of your course and group work. You may wish to change groups more frequently if the goal of the course is to develop communication or language skills, especially listening and speaking skills, or to share multiple perspectives.

5) Consider active learning group activities

Breakout rooms offer great opportunities to incorporate small group activities and active learning assignments. Among the active learning strategies that can be deployed easily in breakout rooms are: 

• Think–pair–share
  In this active learning strategy, ask students to think of a question on their own first, and then send students to breakout rooms of two participants to discuss the question in pairs. Finally close the breakout rooms and ask a reporter from each room to share their discussions with the whole class (Levey, 2020). This activity works ideally with questions that encourage deeper thinking, problem-solving, or critical analysis. This is one of the perspective-sharing activities that may work best if you randomly assign pairs, rather than using recurring pairs.

• Peer-instruction deeper dives
  This activity allows students to compare answers and discuss why they think one or another is correct, rather than responding in isolation. Pose a question or a set of questions and give students time to record their individual responses. These answers could be submitted to a Canvas quiz before the Zoom meeting or during the session using Zoom polling, iClicker Cloud, or Google Forms. After prompting students to recall their answer, send them to breakout rooms to discuss and answer the same questions in groups. This often helps students narrow in on the correct answer. Students can submit the group answers to a Canvas Quiz or a Google Form. After bringing all students to the main room, take a quick look at the group answers and provide feedback to clarify any lingering misapprehensions.

• Small group discussions
  Breakout rooms can be used to facilitate a variety of group discussion activities such as debate, case-based problem solving, brainstorming, reflection, or collaborative work on presentations or projects [3]. Once again, just be sure you give clear directions about what you expect the groups to produce or move toward, before assigning students to breakout rooms. 

• Jigsaw
  For this activity identify a topic, chapter, or reading that can be broken into smaller pieces, and assign each piece to a different group in your class. Each group works to become “expert” on their assigned piece through deeper analysis or additional research. Once that work is done, reassign the groups so each one includes one student from each of the previous groups. Each “expert” teaches their piece to the rest of the group. This activity generally takes place on two separate days, which allows you to use two separate group pre-assignment files for the two sets of groups.

If you’d like to discuss possible approaches to using breakout rooms for your own class, please feel free to reach out to the LSATSLearningTeachingConsultants@umich.edu, or request a consultation here.

Resources

[1] 8 Ways to Be More Inclusive in Your Zoom Teaching- The Chronicle of Higher Education (2020)

[2] Zoom Pre-Assigned Breakout Rooms Instructions- Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT), University of Michigan, (2020)

[3] Adapting Active Learning Strategies to Online Courses-  Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT), University of Michigan, (2020) 

[4] Breakout Rooms video (video, 2.48 min, 2020)

Research

Riggs, S. A., & Linder, K. E. (2016). Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes. IDEA Paper# 64. IDEA Center, Inc.

Levey, D. (2020). Teaching effectively with Zoom: A practical guide to engage your students and help them learn, Chicago, IL, LSC Communications.