Leveraging Breakout Rooms and Google Docs for Small Group Work

     This week's idea came as a quick one. You know those lessons you whip together last minute? It's funny how sometimes those turn out to be really good! And this one was.

 

    My school has a Period X twice a week; this is a catch-all period and can be used for all sorts of things. Another grade-level teacher and I decided to team up together to coteach it this past Friday. But when we got together a few minutes before the start, we realized we hadn't planned anything. Oops. It also happened to be the anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks, and that seemed like a good topic to discuss. Since we couldn't whip up a Nearpod or anything like that, the idea needed to be quick. Enter the lesson plan that did not self destruct: leveraging breakout rooms and Google Docs for small group work. I whipped up a quick KWL chart minus the L and added a column for student names. A few clicks on Google Classroom let me sent it out using the "students can edit" setting. The "students can edit" setting enables ALL students within a Google Classroom class to access/edit/participate in the document at once. If you want a quick version of this KWL chart, you can click the picture below to make a copy. Or click here.

A simple chart can be added to a Google Doc to add accountability to a breakout room

    A quick work on breakout rooms if you've never used them. Breakout rooms in Zoom allow the host to split the participants into groups, much like one would do within the classroom. The host can choose the groupings, or Zoom can do it automatically. There's also a cool button within a breakout room called "Ask for Help." 

Zoom's ask for help button within a breakout room

    When a participant clicks that button within the breakout room, it sends a message to the host and lets the host join that specific breakout room. The button is also anonymous, so if a group is having trouble or no one wants to be known as the person who asks the question, they are safe. However, breakout rooms can be a sort of no man's land in Zoom. A host can join them, but can't oversee what's happening in each one from a central location (anyone at Zoom going to add a feature to change that?). This can make using them feel uncertain. There are two ways I found to deal with these drawbacks: setting expectations beforehand and having students document work on a whole class Google Doc.

    Setting expectations is crucial. As any teacher knows, if you want something to go well, you need to clarify what needs to be done. I like to do example, non-example as a way of demonstrating things. But that's not always enough. There needs to be an accountability piece. Have a whole class editable Google Doc that students document their work on lets the teacher see things as it is happening. Then, they can pop into breakout rooms to support students who haven't started to work or who are making errors in the work. An editable Google Doc also lets students see what other groups are working on and use that to help guide their thinking.

    For this lesson, we set the expectations verbally and then listed them out on the whole class Google Doc. Students started messing around with the Google Doc while we were giving directions so we used that as an opportunity to point out that behavior as a non-example. Then, we sent them into breakout rooms.

    It was a little nerve-wracking at first. We watched the Google Doc for a hot second...and nothing happened. My coteacher said "Should we go in?" I replied "Let's give them a chance to succeed first." And sure enough, they did. The students started populating the chart with their responses. And as the moments passed and we saw things that didn't look right (such as questions phrased oddly or nothing being written), we took turns to pop in to breakout rooms to deal with that. We also used the responses to have a conversation about what to address when we closed the breakout rooms. We were pleased at how many students stayed on task and on topic. After about ten minutes of monitoring the Google Doc and popping around, we brought the students back and wrapped up with a whole-class discussion using the information from the Google Doc. 

    Not too shabby for something whipped together. So now, I ask you dear reader: How do you use breakout rooms? How else could they be used? Any other best practices?