“What are some Zoom breakout topics to get people talking?” asked a student in one of my groups last week. Time for some answers!
First, some quick tips for using Zoom breakouts to keep your meetings, events or training highly participative and full of positive energy:
- Make all breakout activities optional. Paradoxically, that makes people more likely to participate. As the organiser, you should say that participating in breakouts is optional, both in the event invitation and at the start of the meeting (out loud and in the chat). Back up your words with technology, so that people have to click a button to join the breakout, rather than being sent automatically
- Keep breakouts small – 3 participants per room is optimal, 5 maximum, for a lively conversation that involves everyone
- Keep breakouts short, especially at the beginning of an event before people are “warmed up” and feel psychologically safe. By short, I mean less than five minutes
- Make activity instructions clear and simple, and deliver them in writing (via chat or a slide) as well as verbally, to reduce the risk of the whole five minutes being spent on discussing what it was they were supposed to discuss
- If there will be a debrief or another whole-group activity to follow the breakout, explain how that will be managed. Will each group need a spokesperson? Will everyone be called on to speak?
Now, what about those Zoom breakout topics to get people talking? Here’s my flexible, multi-purpose, go-to top ten:
- “Say hello to whoever you meet, and talk about why you’re here” (opening activity, ideal for the Magic Waiting Room)
- “What would you like to happen as a result of being here today?”
- “What questions do you have about what you just heard?”
- “What are your top takeaways from the event so far?”
- “What ideas do you have to solve the specific problem we’re addressing today?” (ask people to add them to the whiteboard, one tip per sticky note)
- “What’s something that’s surprised you in the meeting so far?”
- “What’s one thing that you’ve learned from someone else in this group today?”
- “What’s something that you’ll do differently as a result of being here?”
- “What questions do you have now, that you didn’t have at the beginning of this meeting/event/training?” (near the end of the event)
- “Who will you tell about this event, and what will you tell them?” (near the end of the event)
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Wheel of breakout room questions
What other Zoom breakout topics do you rely on? Please comment below.
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8 thoughts on “Zoom breakout topics to get people talking”
Thanks a lot, this is really useful. I’m intrigued by the voluntary breakout room idea. I’m curious, if people chose not to join breakout groups, what do they do in that time? Hang out with you in the main room and chat? Go take a break and check their email?
Instead of direct questions, we use the sentence completion format to also take the pulse of individual and group learning.
Here’s a sampling of many more tailored to different contexts:
What I’d like to say to begin with…
The feeling I have at this moment…
The idea that most struck me today….
The individual whose most impacted me …
The person in my life I admire the most…
When it comes to xyz, my strength lies in ….
I relate to nature most readily as….
The person I learned the most from today….
What I like to say about this day,/webinar/ experience….
Like the idea of “unfinished sentences”. I also like questions that examine differences: “What did i think of xyx before the meeting, what do i think now?”, “One thing from this meeting that can make a difference next week, in 3 months, in one year?”, “What difference can xyz mean to my colleague, patient, students etc?”.
Letting everyone in the meeting summit the meeting/info-point with one sentence or even on word that i allways working. It is a good thing to do because everybody that leads a meeting can do this.
Like you, I prefer to use small groups though I give people up to 20 minutes in them. I haven’t found this has caused any difficulties. I typically use appreciative questions as people are more ready to share positive stories than to talk about problems.
For example, I am doing something about influencing skills for a charity client tomorrow. I will give a brief description of a model and then ask people to take turns in the breakout groups to talk about their BEST experience of getting someone’s cooperation when they couldn’t insist on it. Then we will share what people have learned about influencing.
Great prompting / priming questions above – thank you for sharing!
My experience has been that they will either stay silent, camera off, or they have a specific thing they want to talk to me about
One reason I don’t go long is that I’ve had feedback, especially from larger public events, that some participants can be unpleasant and even abusive to others in the breakout. You don’t want to be stuck with them for 20 minutes! But within a single organisation, ‘safety’ rules would already be in place and you wouldn’t be likely to get ‘trolls’
Please change the programming of the spinning wheel; it repeats itself so often it becomes annoying to try to read them this way.
I have two suggestions:
Since it is just a graphic gimmick anyway, you could just make a program, that picks the questions from the wheel at apparent random, but in fact goes through the questions in an semi-random-order, that doesn’t repeat itself.
Or you could just let go of the gimmick, and make a list. Not so fancy, but more information efficient.
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