Being aware of some of the potential pitfalls of breakout rooms can help you be better equipped to help your students avoid these issues. Here are some problems to look out for:

• There is less accountability in digital breakout rooms than in a physical classroom. Because of this, students can easily choose to not participate or to get off task.
• It is impossible for the instructor to monitor all the groups at the same time.
• It can feel intrusive when the instructor enters a breakout room. It is not as organic as in a physical classroom, where the instructor is able to quietly drift from one group to another. 
  • There is no way to enter a breakout room undetected. If you disable video and mute your audio before entering, you will cause less disturbance.

The following ideas can help to alleviate or avoid some of the inherent problems of breakout rooms.

• Be very clear with expectations for the breakout rooms. What should the students be accomplishing? How long do they have? Provide written instructions that they can refer back to when they are in the rooms.
• Send students into the breakout rooms equipped with specific roles. For example, time-keeper, note-taker, reporter, devil's advocate, etc.
• Create a Google doc or other collaborative document where each group is required to take notes as they are talking. This allows the instructor to view in one glance what the group is talking about and keeps the groups accountable for their conversations. (This can also replace the need for the instructor to join breakout rooms to monitor conversation, thus allowing student conversation to flow more naturally.)
• Send reminders to students of what they should be doing and how much time is left.

It's easy to fall into the habit of doing the same thing in breakout rooms each class session. Here are a few ideas to help you mix things up.

• Use persistent breakout rooms through the unit or semester so that students have the same group of students and can get to know each other.
• Have students create a project together while in the breakout room that they then need to show to the class (such as a PowerPoint slide or chart, infographic, or meme). This can keep the students accountable and allow them to show a deliverable product at the end of their time together.
• Assign some fun icebreaker activities. These can help to increase social presence in your classroom and allow your students to get to know one another.
• Debate. Have students put themselves in breakout rooms according to their stance on an issue. Give them a few minutes to develop their arguments, then either have a class-wide debate, or recreate breakout rooms where one member of each stance is in each group and have small-group debates.
• Collaborative problem-solving. (With a  follow-up game later to make it fun and see if students arrived at the correct answers.)
• Use Hypothesis to collaboratively annotate and talk about your findings.