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OD&PL and TIPS  are celebrating Student Engagement Week from 15.-19. February.

Background
What tips and tricks are there to keep learners engaged and the experience positive for everyone in breakout room activities? Throughout this week, there will be several opportunities to learn and share new tips and tricks.

This Padlet
Every day, we will post a new conversations starter in this Padlet. Click on the ' + ' to add a post, comment or like what others shared.

Further events:
Share, Adopt, Adapt Workshop: "How to make breakout rooms successful" on Wednesday 17th February 2-3pm, more here:
https://teachingexcellence.leeds.ac.uk/events/

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Individual poster presentations to small group with Q and A, followed by feedback and then group discussion about  improving delivery and design of the posters with an emphasis on learning from what they saw other do well. This learning was fed back to whole class through chat once out of breakout room.

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In the psychology degree, we assign students to breakout rooms with no staff members for 2 hour sessions and leave them to complete statistics worksheets together. We circle through the groups answering questions but it relies on students engaging, showing up, and not sitting in silence. So far they've worked well!

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This isn't the most interesting or innovative example, but I still want to give a big hats off to those students who just use breakout rooms for their intended purpose and try to facilitate discussion despite being met with a blank wall of silence. It's a small thing but so important, and credit to those who just plough on with it.

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Not knowing how many people we would be getting for this session and what they would want to talk about, we had to keep the agenda open. We offered a whiteboard and participants added what they wanted to talk about in this meeting. We then offered a breakout room for each topic and participants could then self-allocate to the room/topic of their choice for a certain time.

This was designed to allow for participants to consciously take ownership of the meeting and then steer the direction of the conversations in the breakout rooms as they wanted. It allowed people to mix and meet new people who shared the same interests.

Going with the flow requires a lot of trust and courage from both participants and facilitators and certainly feels little scary! Worth the effort though!

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I gave each group a jamboard link so that they could track their discussion visually and also draw links between each other's ideas, and add images and hyperlinks. It also meant I could see how the discussions were progressing from the main room. Some students really loved it and continued their jamboards afterwards - others didn't like having to use a different tool. I will definitely try it again.

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I've had a few sessions where I go into the breakout rooms and there is no conversation at all. I think that sometimes can't be helped, but I had luck with letting participants know that someone from their group wood summarise in the text chat when we got back.

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That feeding back after breakout rooms to the whole class
anonymously - by polls or typing on a whiteboard/slide is less intimidating than feeding back verbally in a face to face seminar.  Therefore I've continued to allow different methods for feedback - not stopping students who feel more confident from answering in chat or putting their microphone on, but not expecting that to be the only method of feeding back.

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Having some students stay in the breakout room in silence and not using the chat despite me asking if they were OK made me realise that they wanted to stay in the session but not participate in the breakout room. In subsequent sessions I now ask students if they would like to do the activity alone or with other students in a breakout room. There are usually some who do want to use the breakout room so I think freedom of choice is one solution.

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I asked my foundation year students to appoint a facilitator, an administrator and an observer and rotate these posts. I then send them on three group discussions where they had to reach increasingly complex decisions. We used channels in Teams rather than the breakout group function. This allowed me to see what they were doing in their chat. The different observers fed back on how the group had made sure they were inclusive, how they had reached their decisions and the groups came up with very interesting results. They fed back how they used chat to brain storm,  or shared documents, they used round robin, talking in turn, they voted by putting different suggestions into the chat and the winning suggestion was the one with the most positive emojis. They fed back the results of their conversations using shared documents, whiteboards and with their cameras turned on.  I thought the students developed their own Technological skills, their online facilitation skills, their group / team working awareness and they seemed to enjoy themselves in the process, or at least they said so :) I would do that again.

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Students in my year 1 and year 0 classes told me very clearly they prefer going in and out of breakout rooms under their own steam, especially if their internet cuts out. This allows them to rejoin the right session as they arrive back. It makes them feel more in control.
If I misjudge how long an activity lasts, I notice them drifting back early and can check with the other groups if they want to come back early too, but sometimes they like the time to chat at the end of an activity. If the matter under discussion is engaging enough, they usually talk as well. I have had a whole term using the same people in their breakout groups, they told me to mix it up a bit, so I did change the groups around more in the second term.

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In a normal classroom I would wander about and listen in to the discussions which helps with feedback facilitation in the plenary. I noticed that this does not work for me in the electronic breakout groups, as I usually stifle their discussions. I now join one group for the duration of one breakout session (there is often more than one breakout event in the lessons I tutor) and I stay in one room for the duration of the discussion, the students tend to forget about me being there or integrate me into the discussion and I still have at least some idea what the students talked about to help me facilitate the feedback session.  In a normal face to face session I would ask for one person to feed back on behalf of a group, now in the online classroom, I tend to ask two or three at once to turn on their camera, to make it less intimidating for the people giving feedack.

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With small group teaching where students are comfortable interacting with each other I have found these exercises still work well!

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Groups used H5P (simple coding software) to create a mini learning activity. One student was the 'driver', who shared their screen, while others gave instructions and negotiated what they wanted to produce. As well as being an opportunity to try out a new tool, it was a learning opportunity as during the plenary groups shared reflections on the whole process.

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I took a Mentimeter survey after my students had just finished a breakout room session.  I asked them to give 3 words to describe the 'breakout room experience.' These are the results.

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After negative feedback from students on breakout rooms, we established fixed study groups instead, which worked really well

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After negative feedback from students on breakout rooms, we established fixed study groups instead, which worked really well

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Teams and other spaces make it much easier for groups of students to meet, even if they travel to uni, are carers/parents or have mobility problems. Meetings are easier to arrange without having to worry about booking a room allowing for more flexibility.

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having to manually distribute students into groups in class ... being dyslexic

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having to manually distribute students into groups in class ... being dyslexic

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This took so long and was horrible.. Learned how to set up things beforehand in Blackboard starting groups before students arrive with their names on them and getting them to move into their rooms under their own steam which they prefer anyway. In teams I do the same with channels and do not use breakout rooms as a function, so I do not have to manually distribute.

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That they want more... and that some students don't talk! 

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That they want more... and that some students don't talk! 

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I've had feedback that students want to connect as peers without a teacher from quite early on. So I've included quite a lot of break out rooms since then, and sometimes they are for content related exercises and sometimes for more of a social catch up. I always give some prompts though and on the whole they have gone well, especially with the part-time mature students I work with. My full time, mainly mature group, have occasionally reported silence in the room. I think this is partly their home situations that drag them away from the mic or anxiety in some cases. Giving them a group task over a number of weeks forced some chat and bonding, and going into groups where the mics weren't on to facilitate helped too. I would be less afraid of going into groups now - it can interupt the flow occasionally but more often than not I've found they carry on as though you weren't there. And if they are quiet, you can get them started.

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I was leading a session about networking and dithered between getting them to do speed dating where they had a few minutes with a small group to ask each other some 'get to know you' questions, or having a more competitive bingo style activity with the attached card. I did the latter in the end. It sort of worked! The main learning point was you have to end break out rooms to then shuffle them and start again. So that was clunky as I panicked and custom shuffled them which was slow. However, people did seem to get competitive and have a go. I couldn't hear what was going on and I didn't get feedback afterwards so I don't know if it was valuable, but it seemed like it was worth a go. I'd like to try the speed dating approach too and compare.

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I think we have made leaps of progress with the understanding of how we can scaffold learning outside the classroom. Asynchronous tools to reflect, peer exchange and review, discuss, problem solve... have been really helpful in this world of online learning. And the community building in Teams has been absolutely key, too. We will be able to carry these forward and keep a sense of connection even when not physically in the same space.