Encourage students to speak during Zoom meetings

Icebreaker: What’s in a name?

<10 minutes

Names are simultaneously personal, cultural, and public, so asking people to tell the story of their first name (or a pet’s name, or a friend/family member’s name) invites participants to share as much or as little as they want. This activity works especially well for groups that will be working together repeatedly through one or multiple Zoom meetings.

1. Send students to breakout rooms and ask them to share the story of their name (or another meaningful name) with their breakout room group for 4-5 minutes.
2. Debrief (optional): Close the breakout rooms, and ask a few students to volunteer to share the story of their name with the whole class.

Choosing breakout room spokespeople

<2 minutes

Encourage new voices in your Zoom breakout rooms by designating a spokesperson based on a ‘random’ criterion, such as “Your room’s spokesperson is the person who has most recently attended a concert.” This breaks the ice by giving students something non-threatening to immediately talk about and should result in rotating the spokesperson role.

1. Give students a breakout room task.
2. Ask students to designate a spokesperson in their breakout room who will report back out to the class. Their spokesperson should meet some objective, relatively non-personal criterion (e.g., the person who has the most pets).
3. Send students to breakout rooms to work on the task for the allotted time.
4. Bring students back to the main room, and ask each spokesperson to report out.