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Managing breakout rooms
Dayna Henry, Ph.D. Department of Health Sciences
Problem: Managing small groups
In my face-to-face courses my students often work in small groups on activities. I can roam around the room and see what they are working on, if any groups are stuck, or answer questions. In Zoom breakout rooms, you can only “visit” one room at a time, with lag time in between. This might be reasonable to manage in a small class but what happens when you have many breakout rooms?
Solution: I came across this article on social media that suggested using Google sheets to monitor the breakout rooms. I always name my groups (rather than numbers) to help students remember which group they are in. This is important when you use in-tact groups throughout a semester. I labeled the columns with the names of the teams, included instructions, and changed these each week depending on the activity. See the example below.
I put the link to the google sheet in the chat each class before opening the breakout rooms and required each group to assign a reporter who was expected to update the google sheet with progress and questions. I had 4 TA’s for this course and could send them to groups that were struggling to answer questions. I could also visit the groups that appeared to need extra help and still monitor the other groups whether I was in the main room or breakout room. Monitoring progress meant I knew when to call them back to the main room and I could send longer messages to everyone than Zoom allows in their “broadcast message” function.
