by Rebecca Borowski, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, WWU
Have you ever popped into a breakout room to check on your students, only to find cameras off, everyone muted, apparently using the time for their own purposes, rather than engaging with each other? Encourage students to stay on task in breakout rooms by building clear expectations for the time and providing a means for students to record and share their work. Here’s some advice!
Provide a meeting agenda.
Having clear expectations for the meeting will help students know what to expect. Include expectations for breakout room sessions on the agenda. If students know what they need to complete and how they’re sharing it with you, they’ll be motivated to use breakout room time meaningfully. Consider sharing your agenda on a Canvas page designated for that day’s Zoom meeting, or providing it through a shareable GoogleDoc.
Teach some technology basics.
Breakout rooms will be more successful if students feel comfortable working with the technology available to them. Spend some time at the beginning of the quarter making sure students know how to share their screen, access G+ files with their WWU account, take a picture with their phone and embed it into a Google slide, etc. Consider recording a “Technology Knowledge You’ll Need for This Class” video for students to view asynchronously before your first meeting.
Use Google Docs/Slides/JamBoard.
A lot of the group work in face-to-face meetings can be modified to take place via breakout rooms.
- Have an activity where students sort content on cards into designated categories? Replicate the cards on JamBoard, and have students sort that way. (Make sure you have a separate template set up and ready for each group!)
- Have content where students would work together in class to make a poster and share it with the class? Have them make their poster on a Google slide instead of chart paper.
- Got a list of questions you want students to discuss? Put the questions on a Google doc and ask each group to put one big idea/comment/thing they want to remember for each question.
In addition to holding students accountable for their work during breakout rooms, these artifacts also allow you to check on students’ understanding of the content and follow up if you notice any misconceptions.
See also: Whiteboard Options for Collaboration
Carefully assign students to groups.
This can be difficult for larger classes, but when possible, group students carefully. Have a few students who are always eager to share or who have high energy? Try to distribute those students across groups. Consider keeping groups the same over multiple sessions so that every breakout room doesn’t have to begin with awkward introductions.
Build follow-ups into future assignments.
Help students see the connections between what they do in breakout rooms and what they do in other course components. Perhaps the breakout room can be an opportunity to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming project. An asynchronous activity that is due after the meeting can build on what students began working on during the breakout room session.
See also:
- Group Roles Example – Google Slides from “Counting in Base Twelve” Lesson (requires WWU login)
- JamBoard Example – Problem Type Sort (requires WWU login)
- Jamboard Example – Shape Sort (requires WWU login)
Image Attribution: check out by Lance Knadle from the Noun Project (CC-BY)