Event Design Consultant and Executive Zoom Producer Robbie Samuels shares best practices from his latest book, Break Out of Boredom: Low-Tech Solutions for Highly Engaging Zoom Events. In this episode, Robbie walks through how to set up, manage, and wrap up breakout room tasks to keep the lesson's pace moving forward.

To learn more about Robbie's work, visit his website or connect with him on LinkedIn here.

To listen to this episode with closed captions, click on the video below or scroll down to view the transcript.

References

• Samuels, R. (2023) Break Out of Boredom: Low-Tech Solutions for Highly Engaging Zoom Events. Wordsworth Lane Press

• Zoom Video Communication (2023) How to Videos. Access here. Accessed on: 25 July 2023

Transcript

Laura: TESOL Pop Season six Episode five. Hello, welcome to TESOL Pop, the mini podcast of Visit Features. My name is Laura and joining me today to talk about best practices in using Zoom to teach online is Robbie Samuels. Robbie is an event design consultant and executive Zoom producer who is recognised as a networking expert by NPR. PCMA and Harvard Business Review, to mention just a few.

He is also a TED speaker, fellow podcaster and the author of three books. His latest book, Break Out of Boredom: Low Tech Solutions for highly engaging Zoom Events, was published earlier this year. The chapter on Breakout Rooms is a source of inspiration for today's chat. Robbie, it's a delight to have you on the show. Thank you so much for your time.

Robbie: Thank you for inviting me.

Laura: In today's episode will address some of the hurdles we may encounter in using the Breakout Room feature on Zoom to facilitate interaction between learners. Robbie will share best practices to set those up for success before they disappear into a breakout room, as well as what to do when things don't go to plan. As with many of his episodes, today's topic is relevant to so many teaching contexts, whether you teach English language or other subjects. So why not continue the conversation by sharing today's episode with your teaching community?

To get ideas flowing, Robbie could share a few examples of how breakout rooms can be used in a session or a class?

Robbie: I think the first place to start is to decide what kind of activity you want participants to be engaged in during a breakout and how that specifically serves the bigger objectives or purpose of a session. So you always want to start by thinking, okay, as people are coming into this event or session or class, they're going to be thinking, feeling and are doing one thing.

Robbie: At the end of our time together, we hope they'll be now thinking, feeling or doing something else. A breakout room is a great opportunity to have people discuss something amongst themselves, role play, have a discussion, do a deep dive. One of my favourites is to do it's a little bit of an icebreaker to give people a chance to get to know each other, particularly earlier in a semester.

Robbie: Earlier in a class, if people don't really know each other, they're not going to open up. So the four specific ways I'd like to use this would be an icebreaker to have people share very briefly in about like five or 6 minutes. Have two or three people talking about something kind of fun light-hearted sharing, which is four or five people for up to 10 minutes who are just like all going around the room and each sharing their like 2 minutes answer to a question.

The discussion would be more time. So it could be still four or five people or up to seven or eight, but up to 15 minutes where not every person is going to answer the question, but it'll be a little more free flowing. And then lastly, that deep dive, which could be more than 15 minutes, it could be any number of people, but it would require at least a trained facilitator and may also require a trained note taker. But to kind of have a mini session happening. So those are the four main ways I've thought about it. And each of them does have a sort of sense of how long the session would be, the breakout, as well as how many people to assign to each room.

Laura: That's how you kind of broken it down on almost kind of like a different levels, going from like smaller activities for the icebreaker purpose that you mentioned to the deep dive activities that I can imagine lend themselves really well to project work for, you know, teenage students, adult students to really get into, let's say I've got my lesson plan and I've got some breakout room activities planned.

Are there any things I should bear in mind before I kind of launch into those breakout rooms with my students?

Robbie: Yeah, You are in charge of the design of the session and you should not relinquish that responsibility to your participants by giving them a list of questions to choose from. So ideally you will have a specific question for them to discuss in the time allotted, and that you also suggest, is speaking order and I have been known to be a little too cutesy about this and I have now decided the best practice would be first name or last name, alphabetical or reverse alphabetical, because that is visible on the screen.

And if you do by birth, day or long is the shortest hair or darkest colour shirt. It's distracting from the conversation, taking too long. I also think using the tools within whatever online software you're using. So for Zoom, there is the breakout room options where you can actually set up a countdown clock to show up in the top right corner, and that helps people sort of manage the time more effectively and including how much time at the very end so that they know they can kind of wrap up and come back.

And then also telling them as you open the room about how many minutes per person or if it's not meant to be everyone speaking like giving them a sense of like, here is what the goal of this session is. You're there are other ways to engage besides using the mic. You can also share your thoughts in chat, like telling them sort of what the expectation is.

Then lastly, I like to share the question or prompt and give my own answer or have somebody else ready to give their own answer so that they're really start thinking about what that question is and their brains are more engaged and then lastly, put the question or prompt in the chat in the main room before you send them off and let them know that if they open up the chat, it'll be sitting right there.

So doing that list of things is a way to help people start to think about the question ahead of time. They'll know about what order they're going to be going in. So their name is like starting with an A, They're like, Oh, I might be first, I better be ready to do that. And it is also avoids that awkwardness that often happens when you first get into a breakout room and everyone's muted and we're all like looking around like no one wants on mute.

So these plans help get over that awkwardness but also help people make the best use of the time together.

Laura: Even with these, like best design task and instructions, I find even after years of teaching, sometimes you put students in the breakout rooms, they are familiar with it, but it doesn't always go to plan. Even the best plan lessons. What do you look for when you're conducting a session as indicators that maybe certain group are struggling and may need your support and need a little bit more TLC?

Robbie: Well, Zoom has a feature now where you can actually see activity within a breakout room as the host. You can enable that. And once the participant accepts, like every time they join, you'll be able to see that. And what you see is whether people have their microphones muted or unmuted. So that's one indicator, like if everyone's muted, but one person says on like one person speaking, everyone else is needed for the 10 minutes.

Robbie: I am like, like one person's pontificating and it's not good. The other thing, it'll also pick up if people like to throw emojis up. So you might want to encourage participants to like it when someone's sharing something that's pretty awesome, like throw them a thumbs up or a heart. And if you see lots of interaction, an activity like that, that would show you things are going well and if like that's the norm but no one's doing it, then what are they talking about?

And I also think a debrief is a really big part of this, getting a sense of whether they do they tackle the question honestly. I think a lot of whether or not things go well is about the design ahead of time. So if it's not the right amount of time, it's not a good question. I'll give you like a bad example.

I was at a networking event. I wrote about this in my book. I was at a networking event where seven of us were put into a breakout room for 15 minutes, which is already a lot.

Laura: Yeah, that's quite a long time.

Robbie: And there were three questions that we were supposed to answer already. You can see it's like a math problem that doesn't happen. And the first question was share a challenge you're facing. What happened? We all stared at each other awkwardly because no one knew who goes first. Someone unmuted and shared a challenge and we spent 12 minutes trying to help that person.

And then I noticed there was only 3 minutes left and the six of us had 30 seconds each to share who we were. Now, if the purpose of that breakout room had been to sort of focus energy and attention on one person, that would have been awesome. But it was a networking event. So too many questions. And also the challenge question I would rework.

So if you want people to talk about challenges, ask them to share a challenge they faced and how they overcame it so that we all get to hear like a little bit about some common challenges and also some solutions. And we witnessed each other's resilience, but none of us feel compelled to rescue or help anyone because it's not a current day challenge.

It's a challenge they've already gotten over. But that like current day challenge could be a slippery slope. So understanding like the design of the question and having the right amount of time and what order they go in and not being too cutesy. The order I have talked about horoscopes a lot in the last few years because they've told me to go in the order of birthday and we will just start talking about horoscopes somehow.

Like I'm like, this is not even the question we're talking about. So that's where you just want to be careful about that. But if you particularly, I think what I love about a class is you can really train them where they grow to expect something. I have events that I host weekly and my regulars like they know how this works and I think they're actually better now at how to make the most of a breakout room than someone who's just sort of thrown together for the first time.

Laura: I have one more question about like what we do when learners come back from the breakout room, because often we want to do a debrief to kind of share with the whole group what they talked about and any conclusions they drew. But often this can take up a lot of time and I see often get skipped and the teacher moves on to the next activity because of pressures of time.

But I know it's so important. Do you have any tips on how we can conduct this feedback? Debrief in a bit more of a efficient way?

Robbie: Yeah. As I mentioned, that book feels incomplete.

Laura: Yeah.

Robbie: A debrief it really. I think it closes up the exercise, and it helps refuel, retain the knowledge and helps you understand whether the breakout room was successful and what you intended to do. So the quickest ways would be to just have people write a takeaway and chat, you know, come back and write, write a key, take away from the conversation.

There's no unnecessary and muting to share anything. So that's that's like the quickest thing I can think of. Another way to do it would be nominations and chat where you would say, Hey, if you hear anybody saying, I'm particularly awesome X, you know about this topic, go ahead and nominate them when you come back. And then you call on two or three people to like who get nominated.

And what's nice about that is it will bring different voices to the fore. And at least one person in the room thought, yeah, this is a this person has something worth, it's worth sharing. Another one that I could do is who took notes. That's when I honour the fact that there are always people who their former participation isn't to be on the microphone, but to actually be taking copious notes.

And so I'll say, Hey, if you're the kind of person who took lots of notes, go ahead and use the raised hand function and all like points the reactions button down here, and I'll say, you know, you know, raise your hand if that's you. And share your top two takeaways in the conversation. I'll call on two or three people that do that.

And again, it's bringing different voices in. It's honouring the fact that that's there, that they're involved, and that's what their engagement looks like. And then it takes a little bit of time. But I love sort of the reactions people have to It is what I call a waterfall debrief. It's where I tell them to draft their message in chat but don't hit enter.

And I say like, let's say the question was, if you had free time, how would you spend it? Or if you had free time, what would you like to learn? Or what is your biggest win this week or something like that? I'd say, okay, you know, like pause the chat draft your message and then I'll give them a moment to do that and I'll count 10 seconds down, tell and hit enter and all their answers come flooding in and then you could just leave it at that.

I used to like re over a couple, read them out loud, tell them to go ahead. And they now have the ability to put emojis and kind of respond in line with comments. So I might say, Oh, take a second, you know, comment or throw an emoji up for somebody or encourage them so you don't have to invite anyone to be on, you know, to unmute and speak.

But it's still it's like witnessing a whole collection of responses. Again, a way for you to get a sense of whether, you know, your exercise actually led to something, the one that probably takes the most time, which is the default is the me me, which is where you invite people to self nominate by using either the raised hand function or waving their hand or something.

And they're always going to be some people. I'm one of them. I'm an outgoing extrovert who will always speak. And even the question is I'm like, sure, I'll talk, but that that will not always needs leads. The most crystallised thoughts because they're thinking as they're speaking. And so that might take a little extra time.

Laura: I think it's so great that you offer those alternatives, though, as well, like of using the chat and also playing to people strengths. There is always somebody who prefers and feels more comfortable taking notes and you're giving those people the opportunity to shine in this stage as well. So these are really brilliant ideas and when you're talking about them like, Oh, I'm going to try that this week with my trainees on the teacher training course I'm doing.

Laura: Thank you so much, Robbie, for packing so much valuable practical tips in such a short space of time. I really appreciate it.

Robbie: Absolutely.

Laura: As your fellow podcast, I'm going to let you close the show and let listeners know where can they find out more about you and where can they find your book.

Robbie: Well, you can get all the books, bonus resource library content, and the book at Break Out of Boredom.com The Bonus library includes checklists step by step guides over 30 videos, a sample run of show and lots more. And I would love for you to check out what's going on on my website, RobbieSamuels.com, which has everything else I'm doing, my TED, the NPR interview, my books, my podcast, etc. And I would love for folks to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn. I post quite frequently there. Please send a note and let me know you heard me here.

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