Breakout Group Template

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.