Pre-Assign Breakout Rooms Before Microsoft Teams Meetings

MS Teams Breakout Rooms allow educators to divide participants into smaller groups for more focused conversations and collaborative activities without needing to leave the main meeting.

Facilitates Small Group Discussions: Breakout rooms allow students to discuss ideas, collaborate, and problem-solve in small groups, mimicking the dynamics of in-person group work.
Perfect for Brainstorming Sessions: Organizers can easily organize students into breakout rooms for brainstorming, project collaboration, or peer feedback activities, boosting creativity and interaction.
Manage Rooms Before or During Class: Meeting organizers can set up breakout rooms either before or during a session, providing flexibility to adjust groupings as needed.
Instructor Control or Participant Choice: Only meeting organizers can create and manage breakout rooms on the desktop version of Teams, ensuring control over how and when students are divided into smaller groups. Alternatively, organizers can let participants choose their own breakout rooms, allowing participants to move freely between rooms.
Monitor and Support Groups: Meeting organizers can join individual breakout rooms to observe or assist students, ensuring that everyone stays on track and receives guidance when needed.

Only meeting organizers using the desktop version of MS Teams can create and manage breakout rooms.

Breakout Rooms Before a Meeting

If you plan to assign participants to breakout rooms before the meeting starts, you can pre-assign them instead of doing it during the meeting. The conditions to pre-assign breakout rooms are:

You must be the meeting organizer or a co-organizer
Have the desktop version of Teams
Schedule the meeting through the Teams Calendar or Outlook
Directly invite all participants to the meeting
Uninvited participants who join via a link, meeting ID, or phone call, assignment to breakout rooms must wait until the meeting has started.

Pre-Assign Breakout Rooms

1. Go to your Calendar in the MS Teams desktop app

2. Locate and open the meeting invite

3. Select the Breakout Rooms tab

4. Choose the number of rooms you want, up to 50, and select Add rooms - Use the + button to create more as necessary.

5. Select Assign participants

6. Choose whether you want MS Teams to evenly assign people to rooms (Automatically) or assign people yourself (Manually)

If "Manually" was chosen, assign each person to a room or choose Shuffle to assign everyone randomly.
You may also allow participants to choose their own rooms in the Breakout Room Settings

Breakout Room Settings

Once the breakout rooms have been created for a meeting, meeting organizers can plan and adjust room settings before the meeting, which creates and names rooms, automates room placement, sets timers, and more. To adjust room settings:

Open the Breakout Rooms tab within the meeting invite.
Select the gear icon
Adjust Breakout room settings as needed and select Save when finished.

Breakout Room Options

Room Options are different than Room Settings, as they allow more granular control over participant permissions while they're in the room. While options aren't mandatory to adjust, this provides meeting organizers with flexibility in their execution of breakout rooms. Here, you can adjust participants' abilities to record or present in the breakout room, use their cameras and microphones, manage a lobby, and more. Each room can have its own configured options.

Open the Breakout Rooms tab within the meeting invite - Create your rooms if they have not been created already.
Select the three dots within the room tile.
Choose Room options.
Adjust room options as necessary and choose Save when finished.

Teams Breakout Room FAQ

Are there any limitations to the breakout room feature?

You can't create breakout rooms if there are more than 300 people in a meeting.
If you create breakout rooms before a meeting, you won't be able to invite more than 300 people.
There's no way to share video or audio to a room. The meeting organizer must join that room to share this content.

If I have a recurring meeting, do I need to set up breakout rooms each time?

No. Breakout room assignments will carry over to the next meeting until they're changed or a room is deleted. This can be a good or bad thing depending on the purpose of your meeting, as the chat and breakout room chats are recorded and reused.

Can someone share a link to a specific breakout room?

No. Sharing a link or inviting individuals into a breakout room is not supported, so only participants in the meeting who are placed in a room can participate in that room.

How can I, a meeting organizer, chat with participants in a breakout room?

Each breakout room will have its own chat. Organizers and room participants will be able to access it from the Chat menu in the breakout room window and through the Chat menu in their MS Teams app. Here's how it works:

Participants will be added to a breakout room chat when you open the room, by default, and removed when the room is closed.
You will have access to all breakout room chats.
After a breakout room is closed, so is the chat; no more messages can be sent.
All organizers, co-organizers, and participants can still access the chat history and shared files to their assigned room after the breakout room is closed.

Do breakout rooms show up in the attendance reports?

Yes. Upon viewing the attendance report after breakout rooms were utilized, you can learn which breakout room each person has joined, when they entered it, and when they left. Learn more about attendance reports in Microsoft Teams.