Using Breakout Rooms as a Warm-up for Students

Breakout rooms are a useful and popular feature of zoom.

In my experience as a language instructor and having provided zoom support for large synchronous meetings of other courses, I have observed that students tend to be more engaged and contribute more to large group discussions after they return from a small group discussion.

Small group discussions are often used during in-person instruction. They can also be productive in online instruction. For example: using breakout rooms as a portion of an online version of a “think-pair-share” activity, where students think about a topic individually, discuss the topic in a small group, or “pair”, then everyone reports back to the whole class.

I have observed that even a short ice-breaker at the outset of class serves nicely as a warm-up and students seem more willing and likely to contribute to a large-class discussion than if they had no chance to talk in a smaller group setting. The breakout room activities can serve as warm-ups that might lead to a more structured, more in-depth, content-driven think-pair-share activity, or they could simply get students to engage with one another in preparation for a larger class discussion.