Effective Breakout Rooms and Group Work: 3 tools to take collaboration further

Effective Breakout rooms and small groups are a very important part of any classroom. They give students a chance to talk about their learning, work through problems or ask questions together and hopefully ignite the kind of curiosity that drives learning.

To empower this process, you can use three tools that will help you and students better understand what happened in each grouping. They require little to no effort and really give groups a chance to see and hear what other groups did--and the ideas that came out of their collaborations.

Adding a tool can really make the small group interactions and learning more meaningful for the entire class. It gives students an opportunity to summarize and critically think and report back to the class on their work and ideas. 

Effective Breakout Rooms and Group Work With Socrative:

Using Socrative  (the free version) Quick Question--> Short Answer feature, you can ask students to explain what learning happened in their group. For example, If I am having kids work together to ask questions about a concept in class, I would use Socrative at the end to have individuals share out their favorite question. This gives them a time to choose on their own to think and reflect about the work their group just did, and what they should take away from that time. Then, with Socrative’s feature of voting on responses, I ask the students to look through all examples and vote on the one question, different from their own, that intrigues them most.

What this strategy does:

• Gives students a chance to see questions other groups came up with and metacognitively think about the differences and similarities between the groups and questions
• Have time to be quiet and reflect on their own learning before choosing the question they share
• Gives the introverts who might have been less comfortable in groups a time to focus on learning as individuals.

Effective Breakout Rooms and Group Work With Jamboard:

Jamboard Jamboard is Google’s whiteboard app. Like all other Google products, it’s collaborative. Use it for the messy work of brainstorming or testing out different math or science theories.

What this strategy does:

• Facilitates a collaborative activity where students analyze a document or or problem and create an artifact that shows their learning. They can work on this as a whole class or in breakout rooms. 
• Enables teachers to watch what is happening on the Jamboard in real time to see how the students are working 
• Helps teachers ascertain when they might need to head to the group to help offer more assistance. 

Check out this example from classroom teacher Todd Hyde:

Effective Breakout Rooms and Group Work With Flipgrid:

Flipgrid Flipgrid is a great place to have students talk about what they learned during group discussions and give their own ideas apart from the group, so teachers can verify if they actually learned something in the group. When the group work is complete, have students head over to Flipgrid to break down what they learned and how they might apply it to meet the learning target or to a new and novel situation for transfer of learning to occur. 

What this strategy does:

• Evenly spreads out work tasks, preventing one student from doing all the work while others passively benefit from their efforts 
• Focuses student attention on the task at hand--they know they will have to report out what happens during the group process
• Encourages active learners who apply their knowledge to new situations

Breakout rooms are great for encouraging students to take charge of their own learning with less necessity for a teacher’s direction. Try these strategies for more effective small student groups!