What’s a breakout session?

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Also known as a breakout meeting or round robin, a breakout session is a type of event that often takes place in various types of seminar workshops. With this particular learning strategy, the larger group of attendees is split into smaller groups and offered the opportunity to discuss some specific aspect of the main session topic. With most applications, this short period of breaking down into small groups is followed by reports and discussions of the results of each of the smaller groups with the main body of participants.

The idea behind a breakout session is to allow event attendees to be more actively involved in the learning process. Depending on the scope of subjects or topics provided to each group, opportunities are provided for participants to share information based on experience, education, or even casual speculation. When sessions are supervised by a competent group facilitator, time spent in these smaller groups can prove beneficial to all who attend the conference, training or class.

There are several ways to structure a breakout session. The facilitator can divide the participants into smaller groups and give each group a specific topic to discuss with each other, or give each group the same question in hopes of gleaning some insight into the topic from each of the groups. Within the group itself, one individual is normally designated as the leader who tries to keep the conversation on target. Another individual may be accused of making a list of the group’s observations and insights as the conversation continues. The group often nominates one of their numbers to function as the spokesperson reporting the findings to the main rally once the breakout session is complete and everyone gathers in the main group.

One of the key benefits of using a breakout session approach during a seminar is that attendees are more actively engaged and likely to retain more information after the event is over. For keynote speakers and seminar leaders, the use of breakout meetings in conjunction with lectures, general question-and-answer sessions, and various types of audio and visual aids help add some variety to the process, which in turn maintains the interest of the participants more easily . Furthermore, this approach allows you to draw on the collective experience of the participants and offers the possibility to brainstorm the applications of new knowledge or ideas that people learn during the meetings.

While the idea of ​​a breakout session is common to many training seminars and similar events, the general concept can be used in a number of contexts. Teachers can use this approach in a classroom with relative ease. Even in the context of training a new group of employees, a training manager can use this approach to break the class into groups of two or three, present them with a specific scenario relevant to the workplace, and ask them to apply what they have learned how to effectively address and resolve that scenario.

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