On Sunday I replied to a short Twitter conversation about most of the conversation in Zoom break out rooms being about being in a Zoom break out room with the following thread of tips for making sure most of the conversation in Zoom break out rooms is not about being in a Zoom break out room:
I certainly know the feeling of time in a break out room not being used effectively, but as with all good teaching there are things we can do to reduce the likelihood of this and to maximise the effectiveness of break outs – we simply have to take the principles we know would work well in-person and apply them to online mode, taking advantage of the capabilities of Zoom as a platform.
I do all of my teaching of trainee and early career teachers on Zoom these days, so have had plenty of practice, and so I thought fleshing out the 7 tips I tweeted might be useful for those who use the platform for their teaching/training/development sessions with teachers.
What follows is a mixture of good design being built into the sessions by the fantastic team of curriculum designers who create the sessions (not me!) and things I and my colleagues delivering such sessions have incorporated into our delivery, whether through conscious design, trial and error, or reflection.
1. Keep timing tight. Too little is better than not enough.
I learnt this one explicitly from Erica Woolway, Coleen Driggs and Doug Lemov when I attended one of their TLaC Ration sessions in London back in 2017 and teachers come to implicitly know the truth of this when facilitating group or paired discussion in class. As with the best in-person groups discussions, giving too little time is better than giving too much, so that the conversation is still flowing and vibrant when bringing the group back together, rather than stilted and forced when participants ran out of insightful contributions minutes ago.
2. Have a really clear protocol for the use of the time in the room.
Don’t just give the instruction: ‘Discuss x. You have 9 minutes. Go!’. Include an explicit structure for the use of the time in the break out, eg: ‘Take 1 min to decide who will take notes & feed back. Then 6 mins to discuss. Use the final 2 mins to summarise & agree points to feed back.’ Structuring the time like this makes it more likely a focused discussion will happen for the full 6 minutes, while the administrative/logistical elements are factored in. It also makes it more likely that feed back won’t be ‘whatever the person making notes managed to capture/thinks is important’, but instead will genuinely reflect the full scope of the conversation and the contributions of all those who took part.
3. Go through this protocol before opening breakout rooms & make sure attendees have a copy they can see while in there.
Don’t just have a protocol: display it in the main room and read through it to ensure attendees have paid attention to it, and make sure they have a copy of the protocol that they can access in the breakout room – once in there they obviously cannot see the presenter’s shared screen. I do this by making PDF copies of the protocol slides and either emailing them beforehand, or dropping a link to Google Drive into the chat before I open the rooms.
4. Before opening the rooms, name who is in each room so everyone knows who to expect.
One of the points made in the tweets to which I replied was people in a break out room being unsure if everybody is there, or if they should wait for more people to join them before starting a discussion. To prevent this uncertainty, once I have created the break out rooms, I tell attendees how many people will be in each room and quickly name who is in each one. This seems to prevent the early paralysis described in the original tweet.
5. Make expectations of what to feed back crystal clear.
Include in your protocol for the discussion the specific questions you want the groups to address, and what you want to hear back from them, eg:
- Maximum of 3 strategies for managing pupil participation in discussions
- What you would change about the instructions the teacher gave in the video
- The words and phrases used in the praise shown in the video that made it precise.
If you have lots of break out rooms, and not a lot of time to feed back, ask different groups to provide feed back on specific questions, or ask the even-numbered groups to work through the questions in number order and the odd-numbered groups to work through them in reverse order. This can prevent repetition of the same points, or the final group feeling like everything they wanted to say has already been said.
6. Broadcast reminder messages into the rooms.
Zoom has a feature where you can broadcast messages into the break out rooms. I use this in two ways:
- To post timing reminders (‘1 minute in. Now move on to discussion the questions’; ‘2 mins remaining, now summarise & agree what to feed back.’)
- To post reminders of the questions to keep discussions on track.
7. Circulate through the rooms on mute & with camera off to collate batch feedback (contract this before opening the rooms).
When contracting this in the main room, explain that you do not want your appearance in a break out room to affect the discussion, and so you will have camera off and be on mute. Circulating through the rooms can help you pick up common themes, or common misconceptions. This allows for more targeted questioning by you when back in the main room and gives you the potential to provide ‘batch feed back’ to the groups, either in the form of drawing their attention to common themes or misconceptions, or giving them process feed back on the quality of their discussion or their use of time in the break outs.
Lee Donaghy 