UPDATE 19th January 2021 – Mike Tholfsen has created a great video showing how to use the new breakout room functionality in Microsoft Teams, which you can see below. My original method (further down) still works great, but Mike’s video is also super helpful:
UPDATE 21st December 2020 – Microsoft has officially added native Breakout Room functionality to Microsoft Teams. Whilst my ‘work around’ below is still very valuable, you may be interested to learn how the new functionality works:
- Announcement of new Breakout Rooms blog post
- Education specific support documentation focusing on the teacher/student experience in Breakout Rooms
UPDATE 9th April 2020 – people have pointed out some schools block students creating Meet Now meetings in channels – how can this be resolved? See below.
It’s been fascinating to observe the feedback from educators globally as they’ve been forced to transition to remote teaching due to the #COVID19 pandemic that has shut schools across the globe. I read a statistic today that 91% of students globally have been affected by school closures in some way, shape or form!
Proving just how adaptive and incredible educators are, I’ve heard many reflect on what has worked successfully, as well as what has been a “false start” in their remote teaching experiences.
One consistent theme from educators has been a tendency to “over teach” – using the allocated lesson time for the equivalent of the “full attention” state, not leaving students appropriate time to process, think critically and complete exercises in a traditional “working state”.
It’s perhaps understandable this has occurred. Teachers are keen to ensure “on task” behaviour in these virtual classrooms and also be seen to have prepared sufficient content to be delivered. However, the reality is students need that processing time to critically evaluate what they’re learning and being able to discuss this with their peers is part of this formative state of knowledge development.
Breakout Rooms Help!
To that end, allowing students to form small groups to discuss what they’ve learnt whilst easily providing the teacher visibility of who is meeting with whom, “pop in” to listen in to each breakout room, ask questions of the small groups to prompt deeper thinking as well as give reminders about when to return to the main virtual lesson is a vital tool in the remote teaching toolbox!
Fortunately, it’s easy to achieve in Microsoft Teams as I demonstrate below:
I liken these breakout rooms to the “call waiting” function of a phone – you can easily keep the main classroom lesson call “on hold” whilst popping into other breakout groups that students are using (a single user can be on up to five calls at once).
Pro Tip: Don’t “hang up” your main meeting call to join a Breakout Room in a channel – rather simply join the Meet Now in the channel and it will put your main call on hold. You can have up to four calls on hold at once and circle back through any of them by clicking the “resume” button for the appropriate call in the top left of Teams.
One piece of feedback I received is if there is a lot of chatter in the channel where the “Meet Now” breakout room has been created, the “Join” button can sometimes scroll up and off the screen, not making it obvious how a late comer might enter the breakout room. This can easily be resolved by using the drop down menu in the top right indicating all current calls happening in that channel:
Meetings happening in a channel are displayed in the top right drop down menu, allowing easy navigation to the join button, no matter how much chat is going on.
Here are two more close ups shots of that, the first with the meetings running in a single channel collapsed, the second with the meetings expanded:
What If My School Blocks Students Creating Meet Now?
The great thing about Microsoft Teams is there are very granular policies that control what users (Students and Teachers) can and can not do inside of Teams. We have even created pre-packaged policies for education and the different year levels. For example, this primary school aged policy package has a default setting of blocking Meet Now:
This is explained in more detail in this documentation:
Allow Meet now in channels
This is a per-user policy and applies before a meeting starts. This setting controls whether a user can start an ad hoc meeting in a Teams channel. If you turn this on, when a user posts a message in a Teams channel, the user can click Meet now under the compose box to start an ad hoc meeting in the channel.
A school could, if they chose, override the default setting in this policy package however an alternative way is for the teacher to simply create the breakout meetings in the respective channels. Provided at least one student is in the Meet Now, the teacher can safely “hang up” the meeting and leave the students to it if they wanted to. Here’s a screenshot of a more structured channel approach to breakouts with a single Meet Now running in each channel:
Running 10x Breakout Rooms in a single Team
Final Thoughts
There is a lot more that could be added here, but the general principle of using Breakout Rooms is something many educators may choose to add to their remote teaching skill sets. Invariably, being resourceful, teachers will take this, adapt it and enable students to be empowered in their learning through promoting critical thinking and engagement in small group discussion.
If you’ve got ideas on how you’d use Breakout Rooms in Teams then add them to the comments below.
Can you use this technique with guest attendees? Or, does everyone need to be logged in with a MS Teams account for this to work?
Thanks and that’s a great question – I’ll give it a go in testing. Do you mean a guest inside the tenant (ie invited as a guest member) or a guest who has dialed into the scheduled call and has no other affiliation with the Team?
I was thinking of someone outside of the tenant, possibly even without a Teams account. The use-case is an executive education program.
Thank you.
How do we get the breakout option under general? I wasn’t able to do it. Would that be something the school would add in the general settings of teams or is it somewhat of an added app within teams?
You should still be able to Meet Now in the General channel, however it is possible as the Team Owner (eg teacher) to restrict activity in the General Channel (eg prevent members from posting in there) I’d have to double check but it may be possible to prevent Meet Now in General Channel too.
Hi and thanks for sharing your demo of using breakout rooms within Teams. I was wondering if you know if its possible to record students audio within each breakout room for assignments such as language interpretation?
Hi James, it’s a standard Meet Now meeting so should be able to recorded and sent to Stream for record keeping. Will just come down to a person remembering to click record!
Hi Sam and thanks for the feedback. There is no option for participants within the breakout room to record. it seems only the host has the option to record in the main meet up, but even the host can’t click record while in the breakout room
Hi James,
Just tested this.
1) Created a scheduled meeting in the General channel
2) invited students automatically to the meeting using the General channel as the location in the meeting invite
3) joined the meeting with the teacher and student in separate browsers
4) Had the STUDENT go to another channel to create a Meet Now breakout room.
5) Student had the option to record the Meet Now – see this screenshot I took (have to post a link as can’t add images in comments:
https://concise.info/BreakoutRoomRecording
I tried this today using the general channel for the main meeting and then creating new channels for each breakout room. I don’t understand how you could do multiple meetings in the same general channel – or am I missing something? Anyway, I had four breakout rooms but Teams wouldn’t let me keep all these on hold as well the main meeting – apparently the maximum number of meetings I could be involved in was 4 and I had to hang up one to join the last one. Which made it quite cumbersome. I like to use five groups in my class – so ideally need six channels with meetings I can dip in and out of at one time. Anyone worked out how to do this?
Hi Joanna,
Yes there is a limit to the number of calls you can be “on hold” for simultaneously as I indicated in the blog post, however you can drop off (end call) for one of these and by simply going into the channel that has a call you want to join (indicated by the video camera icon to the right of the channel name) you can find the live Meet Now and click “Join”. This should allow you to get in and out of the five groups you need to administer.
The other thought is if ALL students are in a breakout call, you could actually hang up/leave the main “scheduled call” and then have all five group calls on the go. Then, when needed to return to the “main” classroom you can go back and rejoin the scheduled call (after you’ve dropped out of one or more of the breakout room Meet Now calls).
Trust this helps,
Sam
I was recently in a Zoom class of about 25 students where the instructor SENT us to a predetermined breakout room of 5 students. He also brought us all back to the original class at the end of the breakout session. In MS, it appears the instructor has to tell the student which room to go to. Is there a way to pre-select a room for students to go prior to the start of class based on invitees? Thanks for the assist!
Hi James
Not currently. I believe some of these features you describe are being considered.
Cheers
Sam
Hi Sam
I have tried what you laid out above, and all worked well. I hung up on my main class so I could ‘pop in’ to each of the four pairwork channels I had set up, in the General class channel. Once students knew what to do, it worked quite well.
What I couldn’t figure out to do was to take each PAIR of students (I have a class of 8) through the next activity in the document I was sharing, be it the coursebook, or the PP presentation I had painstakingly put together the night before.
So, in group A I shared the PP, but the moment I left the group to pop in to Group B, the next pair, the doc I had shared with Group A would disappear. I did this 4 times before I realised what was going on (facepam).
Whether or not the students are all doing the same task, or a different task, tell me there’s a way I can share a document in each pairwork channel simultaneously…..,?
While I jump in here and there to monitor?
I teach English to adults, and I cannot monitor 8 people doing a ‘mingle,’ simultaneously, so I thought the pairwork idea was quite an elegant one. Tell me there’s a way to do this?
Thanks,
Ayl
Hi Ayl,
Thanks for your note and pleased that you got the Breakout Rooms working for your classes – well done!
In terms of sharing a screen on one call in a breakout room, then leaving and keeping that sharing going, this won’t work unfortunately.
When you’re on any call, and leave by going on hold, it suspends all audio/video at that point. It makes sense really – if you left “room A” to join “room B” you don’t want your mic and speakers continuing to work from “room A” anymore.
In the same way, you can’t share your screen in “room A”, exit and go on hold and leave that screen on display for your students.
Instead, what I’d recommend would be adding your PPT as a file in each channel so that the students can access it themselves and one student can take the lead and share their screen if they needed to with the PPT on display.
Alternatively, you might simply want to start the break out room meeting and in the chat drop a link to your PPT at that stage, so they simply need to click the link and open the PPT themselves.
Trust this makes sense? Keep up the great work!
Cheers
Sam
I do know how to get stduents to work on a whiteboard in breakout rooms. I however need clarification on how does the facilitator in the Main room pull up a whiteboard that was designed by students in Breakout room 1 or Breakout room 2 etc, so everyone can see each group’s work during share-out in the Main room. Your help would be much appreciated. I know it is easy for the facilitator to pull up a Word doc developed in different breakout rooms, but I haven’t figured how to do that with the whiteboards yet.
Deborah: Once they finish creating their Whiteboards, you could have 1 student in each Breakout Room, SAVE their Whiteboard under ‘File’ and then they can open it when you get back into the Main Room, to share with other students.
Can you assign students to each break out room? Or you tell students to go which ever they want?
Halogem, currently there is no way to assign users/students to a specific breakout room / call.
Formalized breakout room functionality is coming to Teams – see this blog post about the roadmap:
https://samuelmcneill.com/2020/06/16/education-focused-updates-to-microsoft-teams-including-7×7-videos/
For now, you can use the guide in this video.
We gave a teacher and an EA supporting the breakout groups. Is there any way to enable a second (or third ) person moving among the breakout groups
Hi
Based on my method described in this post, *anyone* can move between the breakout rooms as they are simply “Meet Now” calls running inside the Team.
With the newly released official “breakout rooms” for Teams I’ve not had a chance to test how the moderation of these works and if people can move between Teams yet.