Ten Tips for Bringing Breakout to the Classroom

published by Mike Neumire on 11/29/2022

For teachers looking to provide students with opportunities to strengthen communication, critical thinking, collaboration, and other soft skills, breakouts are a natural choice. They challenge students in novel ways and give authenticity to teamwork. If you’ve tried this kind of learning activity and it felt overwhelming or didn’t go quite as you hoped, here are ten tips for your next go.

10. Laminate your clues

This one may seem obvious, but it makes a big difference and signals to students that the materials are permanent. It’s helpful to have fine-tipped dry erase markers available for them to write on top of the lamination and/or to encourage students to use scrap paper.

9. Hide objects for an easy entry point

For many students, the lack of concrete clarity on what to do or what a clue might mean can be intimidating, making it hard to begin to engage with the game. These are the important problem-solving skills that breakouts can help develop, but in order to draw reluctant students into the experience, it helps to have hidden objects that they can go on the hunt for. It’s usually helpful to indicate a number of items, so that students aren’t always looking for more. You might do this by labeling the objects “1 of 6” for example. By doing this, you create a concrete task that students are confident they are doing correctly, even if the hidden locations are challenging to find.

8. Play several games so that you can reflect on soft skill growth

Breakout games can be an engaging way to introduce a topic, review a concept, or build on prior knowledge. But its real value is its ability to develop soft skills like problem solving, collaboration, time management, communication, and critical thinking. After running a breakout, it’s worthwhile to take time to reflect on and discuss the experience, pointing out the skills and strategies that helped students be successful. It is even more worthwhile to find more opportunities for breakouts, so that students are empowered to try out new strategies and develop what works best for them. Multiple opportunities to put soft skills to work means the teacher can monitor growth of those skills. Consider having students reflect at the end of a game by having them self-grade using a rubric. Then use that same rubric in the future and track how students feel they’ve grown.

7. Have a lock of the week

It’s not always logistically possible to facilitate a full breakout game with fidelity, but don’t let that limit you to pre-holiday or the end of a unit. You can still tap into the engagement and soft skill development that comes with breakouts without the full workload. One simple way to bring some casual mystery to your classroom is to have a lock of the week. This lock sits and waits for students who complete lessons early, or maybe as a station for small groups to rotate to during centers. The lock might be connected to curriculum, but because it’s not necessarily supplanting instruction time, it can be focused on those topics that we know are important, but don’t always fit nicely into core instruction, like digital fluency or computer science! When students successfully unlock the lock of the week, they can drop their name into the box and relock it for the next puzzle-ready student. At the end of the week, those student names can be used for a raffle of some kind.

6. Break up your clues into levels

The traditional breakout experience gives students access to every lock and every clue, all at once. This does not always play out the way we hope it will. It can be messy, and teachers are left deciding if they should intervene, scaffold on the fly, or hang back and encourage productive struggle. You might consider restructuring your locks and clues to flow a little more naturally, even if you just want a change of pace. Rather than the all-at-once approach, you can organize your locks linearly from easiest to hardest. Then, you can give students the clues for the first lock, and let them unlock the next set of clues. In this way, students don’t have to worry about accidentally focusing the wrong clues on the wrong lock. There is also less of an emphasis on unlocking the whole box, and more of a focus on seeing how far down the line you can get.

5. Scaffold with stickers

One of the issues that pops up when facilitating a traditional breakout game is that students often confuse and mix up clues. Because clues for all six locks are out and available, students don’t necessarily see the connection clues and their locks. One easy way to deal with this issue is to code the clues and locks with stickers. This makes it easier for students to know where to spend their puzzling energy. They can look at the type of lock they need to solve, like a directional lock or a color lock, and use that guidance to help them figure out what they need from the clues they have. If you have multiple clues for one lock, you can even add a number next to the sticker so that students know they don’t have the whole picture in front of them.

4. Introduce students to the game and story ahead of time

Breakout games are more engaging when they lean on narrative. A good story makes a mystery worth investing in, and participants will be driven to close the open loops we’ve laid before them. However, a lot of the game time gets eaten up by explaining the rules, suggesting some strategies, and setting up the narrative. If we separate that necessary but tedious part of the game, we can preserve game time and even build anticipation. For example, you might turn your rules, strategies, and narrative into an intro video that students can view up to a week in advance. If you embed part of a clue in that video, students can rewatch it several times and make some predictions about what will be waiting for them.

3. Use breakouts to work on communication skills

Breakouts are excellent vehicles for developing a host of soft skills, including communication. One super easy way to hyper focus on communication is to split your clues into two-player or two-group sets. With this structure, players are forced to communicate because they can only see half of the clues. For example, you could take a ransom note clue and cut it in half. Player one gets one half and player two gets the other half. On their own, neither player can make sense of the clue. But by communicating what they see to each other, they can figure out how to make sense of the entire clue. By using this structure, the challenge of the game shifts to communication, so you don’t need to spend time adding complexity to each clue- you can keep it simple! This format works well for partners, but it can be run with two groups. It also works well with digital clues, because each player is looking at a screen, so if players are facing each other, their screens aren’t visible to their partner. It also works well through video conferencing. If you have the space, you can split groups into two separate rooms, and give them walkie-talkies to communicate. This should lead to loads of teachable moments about successful communication.

2. Have students create

One of the biggest obstacles to using breakouts in your classroom is the burden of creation. It takes a significant effort to plan and create clues related to a topic, theme, or set of skills. But taking the sole responsibility of creating for your students ignores your greatest resource: students as creators. Rather than planning a whole game yourself, turn it into a jigsaw exercise. After a lesson or unit, break students into small groups and challenge them to create a clue and lock based on what they’ve learned or they think is most important for others to learn. Then, students could regroup so that each new group has one representative / hint giver for each lock. Alternatively, you could collect all the clues and locks digitally, and run the game as a whole group. You could also turn the game into a gallery walk, where the original groups rotate to other groups’ locks and try to solve them, as well as provide feedback.

1. Create a digital version of your locks and clues

While physical locks are more satisfying to unlock, digital locks relieve a lot of logistical stress. If you have a group of 20 students, it can be complete chaos to have them all trying out their theories on one set of locks. That kind of chaos can lead to broken locks and hurt feelings. Digital locks help smooth that potential chaos. If students have a link to a digital set of locks in addition to the physical set, they can test hundreds more theories than if they had to wait their turn to try the physical locks. If you break your class into smaller groups to compete against each other, you can require them to solve all the locks digitally before they can touch the big box. You don’t even need to have your clues available digitally- you can still benefit from the tangible clues and students can bring their solutions to the digital locks. The Breakout digital platform also includes Immersive Reader, making materials accessible for all learners.

Students, like other humans, love to close an open loop. When we design a learning experience to play like a mystery, students engage. However, this is a daunting task to take on as a teacher oversaturated with other responsibilities. If you’re interested in putting some of these tips into action, but aren’t quite ready to take it on yourself, reach out! I would be happy to design, facilitate and reflect on a breakout with your students!