- Keep breakout discussions short and focused. Conversations tend to be less productive if breakout sessions are too long.
- Provide detailed instructions for all learners prior to placing them in breakout rooms. Consider posting the instructions to Canvas to ensure learners can still access the instructions while in the breakout rooms.
- To make breakout rooms more engaging, ask your learners to create a ‘product’ to share when they return to the large group. The ‘products’ can be anything—a three-sentence theory for an issue, a mnemonic, a piece of advice, etc. Try to focus on things that don’t have a single correct answer.
- Make sure to monitor the breakout rooms to ensure learners are staying on task.
- Use Canvas Collaboration Tools and/or Google Drive (forms, documents, sheets, presentation) to supplement the breakout room activities.
- Create a collaborative document in advance for each group or for the entire class. If the document is shared to the entire class, make sure to specify where in the document each group is supposed to enter their responses.
- It may be useful to include the full instructions in this document as well.
- Be sure to review the instructions with the entire class (including how to access the collaborative document).
- Each group is then put into their breakout room and can make notes/comments within the collaborative document.
- You can then more easily monitor the progress of each group based on the information they are adding to the shared document.
The following articles include examples of how to use Google Forms and Google Docs for breakout rooms (please note, these examples do not describe creating the document via Canvas Collaborations):
