Breakout Rooms

Zoom provides an option to put participants into breakout rooms for doing smaller group activities. Each breakout room allows participants to use video and audio, share their screens, see a participants list and engage in chat.

Important Things to Note

    • Make sure you're signed in to your account to see all the host options.

  • Host and co-hosts can move between rooms when the breakout rooms are open.

  • Breakout rooms are enabled by default in UW accounts, but, by chance, if you don't see breakout rooms as an option in your control bar as in the image below, you need to turn on breakout rooms on your account settings.

Best Practices

  • If you have a list of discussion questions or directions for activities for the breakout sessions, consider sending those to your participants in advance, or if you are an instructor you can post them on your Canvas course.

  • Be clear on what you want the participants to accomplish and what they should deliver by the end of the breakout sessions.

  • If you use breakout rooms for your class, consider having students work within the same groups throughout the quarter so they can build rapport with each other. Use the pre-assign breakout rooms so you don't have to re-create the same ones every time.

  • Have participants take notes during the breakout session inside a Google Doc or other real time collaboration tools. You can use it to gauge how each breakout is going, and if you notice no activity for a particular group you can join their breakout room to make sure things are going well.

Manage Breakout Rooms

See Zoom Support article on Managing Breakout Rooms.

Pre-Assign Breakout Rooms

If you know in advance how you want to group your participants, pre-assigning breakout rooms is a useful feature, but be sure to require participants to be signed in to their Zoom account (you can do this while scheduling or editing a meeting) so Zoom can recognize them and put them in the correct rooms.