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.
Mind Map Template
Works best for:
Planning, Mind Mapping, Education
We see you, visual learners. You grasp concepts and understand data easier when they're presented in well-organized, memorable graphics. Mind mapping is perfect for you. This powerful brainstorming tool presents concepts or ideas as a tree — with the central subject as the trunk and your many ideas and subtopics as the branches. This template is a fast, effective way for you to start mind mapping, which can help you and your team become more creative, remember more, and solve problems more effectively.
Status Report Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Documentation, Strategic Planning
A status report provides a snapshot of how something is going at a given time. You can provide a status report for a project, a team, or a situation, as long as it emphasizes and maps out a project’s chain of events. If you’re a project manager, you can use this report to keep historical records of project timelines. Ideally, any project stakeholder should be able to look at a status report and answer the question, “Where are we, and how did we get here?” Use this template as a starting point to summarize how something is progressing against a projected plan or outcome.
Likert Scale Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Decision Making, Product Management
It’s not always easy to measure complex, highly subjective data — like how people feel about your product, service, or experience. But the Likert scale is designed to help you do it. This scale allows your existing or potential customers to respond to a statement or question with a range of phrases or numbers (e.g., from “strongly agree” to “neutral,” to “strongly disagree,” or from 1 to 5). The goal is to ask your customer some specific questions to turn into easy-to-interpret actionable user insights.
Priority Matrix Template
Works best for:
Business Management, Strategic Planning, Prioritization
If you need a little more than a basic to-do list, then you’d probably benefit from a Priority Matrix. The Priority Matrix template is designed to help you determine which tasks are critical so you can focus on the most urgent needs. In a 2x2 matrix, input your priorities based on whether they must be completed with high or low urgency and are of high or low importance. Applicable to project management and personal management alike, use the Priority Matrix template to improve business processes, create efficiency, remove blockers, and reduce operational waste.
Christmas Retrospective
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Meetings, Retrospectives
The Christmas Retrospective template offers a festive and celebratory approach to retrospectives, incorporating the holiday spirit into the session. It provides elements for reflecting on achievements, sharing gratitude, and setting intentions for the future. This template fosters a sense of warmth, togetherness, and appreciation among team members, encouraging reflection on both professional and personal growth. By infusing the retrospective with the joy of the holiday season, the Christmas Retrospective empowers teams to strengthen relationships, cultivate positivity, and drive continuous improvement effectively.
Check-In Icebreaker Template
Works best for:
Icebreakers, Meetings
Run a dynamic online session with the Check-in Icebreaker Template. Use this icebreaker before your meeting to boost energy levels, connect people, and warm up the room.