Starting Breakout Groups in Zoom

Starting Breakout Groups

Note: If you plan to use pre-assigned groups, you must add them before starting the meeting. You can do so by following instructions here.

1. Start your Zoom meeting and wait for attendees to join.
2. Select “Breakout Rooms” from the menu bar.
   • If you are sharing your screen, you can hover your pointer over the green “you are sharing screen” rectangle to access the menu.
   • If you do not see “Breakout Rooms” in the menu, it can be found under “More”.

Next steps for randomly assigned or manually assigned groups

1. Indicate the number of breakout rooms.
2. Choose “Automatically” for a random assignment or “Manually” to select attendees for each group.
3. Click “Create Rooms”
   
4. If you have selected “Manually”, click “Assign” to the right of each room and select the attendees for that room
5. Click “Open All Rooms”
   

Next steps for pre-assigned groups

1. If many attendees are not listed in their groups, click “Recreate” in the bottom left corner of the pop-up window and select “Recover to pre-assigned rooms”
2. If attendees are still not listed in their groups, click “Assign” or the blue number to the right of each group and select the missing attendees for that group.
3. Click “Open All Rooms”.

Join breakout rooms as the host (Optional)

1. Click “Join” to the right of each breakout group
2. When you are ready to leave the breakout group, select “Leave Room”, then “Leave Breakout Room” in the bottom right corner of the Zoom window.

Note: Assign co-hosts to a breakout group before the rooms are open to allow them to join and leave groups unassisted.

End the breakout session

1. When you are ready to bring the breakout groups back to the main session, reopen “Breakout Rooms” from the menu if the window is not already open.
2. Click “Close All Rooms” in the bottom right corner of the Breakout Rooms panel.

Note: By default, attendees will have 60 seconds to remain in the breakout rooms before they are returned to the main session.