Breakout Rooms enable Meeting Organizers to separate participants of a meeting into several meetings. Organizers may randomly or manually assign participants, and can move freely between these Breakout Rooms to check-in on ongoing subgroup discussions.
This popular feature is effective for classes and teams of all sizes, enabling more rapid creation of small groups for dealing with specific tasks or having subgroup discussions.
Requirements for Joining or Hosting Breakout Rooms
For access to Breakout Rooms and some other Microsoft 365 and Teams features, please ensure your device meets the following requirements
- Ensure the new meeting experience is enabled
- Updated and supported Operating System (OS)
- Apple only officially supports the three most recent versions of macOS. Please ensure you are running macOS 10.14 Mojave, 10.15 Catalina, or 11 Big Sur. Click here for details and upgrade information.
- Windows users should ensure they are running Windows 10 or Windows 8.1 and are fully updated.
- Android and iOS users can be placed into Breakout Rooms but cannot create or manage Breakout Rooms. Please ensure your device is fully updated.
- Updated Teams Desktop Client
Should you use Teams Channels rather than Teams Breakout Rooms for Small Groups?
Breakout Rooms can help organize on-the-fly group discussions by quickly placing each participant into a video call with an automatically generated subgroup. If your team or class doesn’t often break into small groups, it’s probably the right choice to use Breakout Rooms.
However, for teams that more regularly work in subgroups, or who will consistently collaborate or share documents or files with members of their subgroups, creating small group channels may be the right solution.
Comparison Chart: Channel Meetings & Breakout Rooms
Channel Meetings for Small Groups | Breakout Rooms |
Channel Pros: | Breakout Room Pros: |
Can be used for stable groups across class sessions (e.g., the same students are in the same group for multiple classes).
Stores collaborative documents within the Channel. You can assign TAs to Channels in advance. |
Flexible: Includes options for randomly or manually assigning students into a group, on-the-fly. Manual assignment is not fast; consider only doing this when the whole group is 15 or smaller.
Easy for students to navigate between the breakout room and the main meeting room, if you select the option to allow students to go back and forth. For one class session, groups remain stable (e.g., the same students are in the same group, but only for that one class session) until they are “recreated” (which will shuffle people into new rooms). |
Channel Cons: | Breakout Room Cons: |
Requires advance set-up.
Students can get lost navigating between meetings. Requires clear communication about which student is starting the meeting. Requires good communication to bring students back into the main meeting; the meeting organizer can’t “end all Channel meetings and bring everyone back.” |
Cannot be set-up in advance.
Only the meeting organizer (the person who schedules the meeting or starts an ad-hoc meeting) can create and manage the rooms. Only the students who are in the meeting at the time the rooms are created are placed into a breakout room; if a student joins late, they are just waiting in the main class meeting for the meeting organizer to assign them to a breakout room. If using random assignment, you need to manually re-assign TAs to breakout rooms; they won’t be automatically distributed across rooms. Mobile devices are unreliably functional. |
Breakout Rooms for Participants
Participant Capabilities
Participants are not able to manage any Breakout Room settings or options – only the Meeting Organizer can change these settings.
When joined to a Breakout Room, participants will automatically be granted the Presenter role in that Breakout Room. The Presenter role has some additional capabilities over the default Attendee role.
Typically, this includes the following:
- Access to Meeting chat
- When your Breakout Room is closed or you are unassigned, you will no longer be able to post in the room’s meeting chat. You can still view messages and content up until the point when you were removed or the room was closed.
- The ability to start a recording.
- The ability to view the participants list.
- You will not be able to invite others to the Breakout Room
- The ability to share content, such as your screen or a specific app.
Entering and Exiting a Breakout Room
When you are automatically moved into or out of a Breakout Room, you will see the messages below before being automatically moved to the breakout room.
Breakout Rooms Opened
Breakout Room Closed
Join Breakout Room prompt
Depending on how the Meeting Organizer set up the meeting, you may not be automatically moved to your Breakout Room, and instead will see the following.
If you accidentally close this window, or you click Later, the Meeting Organizer can manually ask you to rejoin the meeting, or you can join the Breakout Room if you see it in your list of chats.
Swap Between the Breakout Room and Main Meeting
Meeting organizer can configure their Breakout Rooms to enable participants to freely swap between the Breakout Room and main meeting.
If this option has been enabled and the Breakout Rooms have been opened, you will see the option to Join the Breakout room or Return to the main meeting.
Join room
Return
Breakout Rooms for Meeting Organizers
Creating a Breakout Room
Requirements for Creating a Breakout Room:
- Only the Meeting Organizer can create and manage Breakout Rooms.
- Classroom-style Breakout Rooms should plan ahead if they intend to have TAs manage their Breakout Rooms
- The Meeting Organizer must be there thru the meeting to manage the Breakout Rooms
- The Meeting Organizer must be using the Teams Desktop Client
- Participants can be on mobile or can use the Teams Web App.
- Click the Breakout rooms button (
or
) from the top-right menu bar.
- Select how many rooms you need, choose whether to automatically or manually assign participants to rooms, then click Create Rooms. You can add more rooms and re-assign participants to rooms later.
- At this point, you have successfully created your Breakout Rooms and should see them displayed in the sidebar.
Opening your Breakout Rooms
Closing your Breakout Rooms
Managing Room Assignments
Renaming a Room
Adding an Additional Room
- Click the Breakout rooms button (
or
) from the top-right menu bar.
- Click Add room. This will create a new room with a default name. See these instructions for renaming the new room.
Recreating Rooms
If you want to start over with your Break Out room, you can use the Recreate Rooms feature. This can be useful if there was an issue automatically assigning a large number of participants to groups.
- Select Recreate rooms from the 3-dot
menu in the top-right corner.
- Confirm you want to delete all of your existing Breakout Rooms.
- Use the instructions above on Creating a Breakout Room.
Deleting a Room
Deleting a Breakout Room removes the selected room from the rooms list, but does not delete the chat and any associated recordings or chat created in that chatroom. Deleted Breakout Rooms cannot be returned to the rooms list.
- Click the Breakout rooms button (
or
) from the top-right menu bar.
- Hover your mouse over the empty, to-be-deleted room, then click the 3-dot
menu and select Delete room.
- Click Delete room to confirm deletion.
Advanced Options for Meeting Organizers
Making an Announcement
Announcements allow Meeting Organizers to broadcast a message to each Breakout Room. This has several uses, including posting a reminder of the discussion topic or informing participants that you will be closing the Breakout Rooms.
- Click the Breakout rooms button (
or
) from the top-right menu bar.
- Click the 3-dot (
) menu next from the top right corner then select Make an announcement.
- Enter in your desired message, then click Send.
The announcement will be posted in the Meeting chat of each Breakout Room.
Joining Open Rooms
Meeting Organizers can join individual open Breakout Rooms on the fly as needed. It is not possible to join all meetings simultaneously, though you can access the individual Meeting Chats for each room.
Be aware that participants will not be notified that you have joined their room, so it may be helpful to post a chat when you join.
- Click the Breakout rooms button (
or
) from the top-right menu bar.
- Hover your mouse over the room you wish to join, then click the 3-dot (
) menu and select Join room.
- To return to the main meeting, you can leave the Breakout Room and click Resume
Allow Participants to go between their Breakout Room and the Main Meeting
While some meeting organizers may opt to mimic this behavior by simply Closing a Breakout Room, enabling your participants to freely move between their Breakout Room and the main meeting preserves their ongoing access to the meeting chats, files, and other content specific to that Breakout Room.
Normally, when a Breakout Room is closed, all participants are removed from the Breakout room, and will have read-only access to the content in that room available up until they were removed.
To enable participants to freely swap between their Breakout Room and the main meeting, select Room settings from the 3-dot menu in the top-right corner, and check Let people go back to the main meeting.
Recording in Breakout Rooms
Breakout Room recordings function similarly to normal meeting recordings, except that Breakout Room recordings are not automatically uploaded to Microsoft Stream, and must be manually downloaded. You can find these recordings in their respective meeting chats
A Breakout Room recording can be started by anyone assigned to that Breakout Room, as all participants are given the Presenter role when they are joined to a room.
The main meeting still follows normal restrictions – only the Meeting Organizer and Presenters may start a recording (participants have the normal Attendee role in the main meeting by default). You can read up on Microsoft Stream Basics in our dedicated guide.
It is not currently possible to start a recording in each Breakout Room with only a single click. Meeting Organizers must systematically join each room and start the recording. Alternatively, consider appointing a participant of each Breakout Room to be responsible for starting a recording. You could also send an Announcement reminding participants to record their discussion.
Manually Inviting to a Breakout Room
If a participant isn’t automatically added to their assigned Breakout Room, you can manually prompt them to join. This may be necessary in cases where the Meeting Organizer chose not to automatically move people into open rooms, or if the participant joined the main meeting after the meeting organizer had already opened rooms.
- Click the Breakout rooms button (
or
) from the top-right menu bar.
- Expand their assigned Breakout Room, then hover your mouse over the participant, then click the 3-dot (
) menu and select Ask to Join.
- The selected participant will receive a message asking them to join their assigned Breakout Room.