Breakout Group Template
Empower your team to share their ideas, brainstorm, and collaborate. Use this template to create fun and efficient breakout group sessions.
About the Breakout Group Template
Run more efficient team meetings and foster productive breakout discussions. This template is designed to keep breakout sessions actionable and engaging, no matter the topic at hand.
What are the benefits of a breakout group?
One of the best parts about running a virtual or hybrid meeting is that you can provide various ways for people to participate. Participants who prefer speaking to a smaller group instead of a larger one can benefit from breakout groups.
When planned well, breakout groups make it easier for people to engage in honest, open, and creative dialogue. In a more intimate setting, people who don’t usually speak up can feel safe sharing and learning from teammates. That leads to a more creative and free-flowing exchange of ideas.
There are many benefits to using a Breakout Session Template during your next team meeting, including...
Easy to use. Save time by using our premade Breakout Group Template instead of creating your own from scratch. Get started by signing up for free to update it with your own information.
Built-in collaboration. Invite your team members to collaborate on your new Breakout Group Template. Miro enables you to engage co-located and remote teams in a virtual workspace without constraints.
Seamless sharing. Need to share your Breakout Group Template with others? Miro makes it easy to share and export, including saving to PDF.
What is a Breakout Group?
Most of us have probably been put in a breakout group at some point during our careers. In a typical breakout group session, the meeting facilitator divides up participants into smaller groups to privately discuss a topic.
Breakout groups provide an excellent opportunity for teammates to have candid conversations and connect on a more intimate level than is possible during a broader meeting. When you’re in a large group setting, it can be difficult for people to feel safe or comfortable speaking up. In a smaller group, participants can feel safer sharing their ideas. Since the group is more intimate, teams are empowered to participate rather than observe.
Create your own breakout group
Get started by selecting the Breakout Group Template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
Decide which parts of the meeting will be centrally facilitated and which will involve smaller breakout groups. This will help you figure out what kind of content you need to prepare for the individual teams to work on.
Plan out who should attend. Do you want to include only core team members? Cross-functional participants?
Decide who will go in which group. Unless you’re randomly assigning people to groups, it’s helpful to assign participants to groups before everyone is in a room together. Some facilitators like to give everyone a personality test and then sort them according to results. Others like to create highly cross-functional groups to stimulate conversations.
Layout clear instructions for each group. Specify what participants in each breakout group should aim to accomplish during their session, including what they should do individually versus with the rest of the group, how much time they have to complete their project, and when they can take a break.
Set the stage for participants. Before you break everyone up into groups, let people know what to expect during the session. Tell them how many people will join their session and how long they will spend together. But more importantly, orient participants by explaining why they’re going into breakout groups. Let them know what you’re asking them to do, how you’re asking them to do it, and why you’re asking them to do it.
Give people the tools they need to thrive. Once you break everyone into groups, make sure they have the tools they need to feel comfortable and get the most out of their session. That can include pragmatic tools, like setting up a static green shape on a board that participants can change to red if they need help. But it can also include interpersonal tools, like questions participants can ask each other if the group goes silent, such as “What else?” and “Tell me more about that.”
Bring everyone back together to discuss. When everyone is finished with their groups, make sure to wrap everything up as a broader team. Place participants’ work on a central board to help synthesize ideas. That way, people can get the chance to share what they learned from their groups and to see what other people took from the exercise.
Meeting Template
Works best for:
Meetings, Team Meetings, Workshops
Everyone has been in a meeting that didn’t go as planned. Maybe it ran off course, or you ran out of time to accomplish everything you set out to do -- or maybe it just felt like a waste of time. To avoid that, it’s important to prepare to run a team meeting ahead of time. With this simple but effective template, you can prepare to run a team meeting that ticks all the boxes. By creating a streamlined way to build preparation into your workflow, you’ll ensure your meetings are efficient, enjoyable, and collaborative.
Effective Meeting Template by Zoom
Works best for:
Team Meetings
Run effective meetings and keep everyone focused with Zoom’s Effective Meeting Template. Bring structure and creativity to every online meeting.
Johari Window Model
Works best for:
Leadership, Meetings, Retrospectives
Understanding — it’s the key to trusting others better and yourself better as well. Built on that idea, a Johari Window is a framework designed to enhance team understanding by getting participants to fill in four quadrants, each of which reveals something they might not know about themselves or about others. Use this template to conduct a Johari Window exercise when you’re experiencing organizational growth, to deepen cross-functional or intra-team connections, help employees communicate better, and cultivate empathy.
Project Charter Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Documentation, Strategic Planning
Project managers rely on project charters as a source of truth for the details of a project. Project charters explain the core objectives, scope, team members and more involved in a project. For an organized project management, charters can be useful to align everyone around a shared understanding of the objectives, strategies and deliverables for a project of any scope. This template ensures that you document all aspects of a project so all stakeholders are informed and on the same page. Always know where your project is going, its purpose, and its scope.
PI Planning Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Strategic Planning, Software Development
PI planning stands for “program increment planning.” Part of a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), PI Planning helps teams strategize toward a shared vision. In a typical PI planning session, teams get together to review a program backlog, align cross-functionally, and decide on the next steps. Many teams carry out a PI planning event every 8 to 12 weeks, but you can customize your planning schedule to fit your needs. Use PI planning to break down features, identify risks, find dependencies, and decide which stories you’re going to develop.
Daily Stand-up Meeting Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Meetings, Software Development
The entire team meets to review the day before and discuss the day ahead. These daily meetings, also known as “scrums,” are brief but powerful — they identify roadblocks, give each team member a voice, foster collaboration, keep progress on track, and ultimately keep teams working together effectively. This template makes it so easy for you to plan daily standups for your sprint team. It all starts with picking a date and time, creating an agenda, and sticking with the same format throughout the sprint.