If you've ever taught online using breakout rooms, you've probably asked yourself this question. You have students split into groups, and you want to keep an eye on all of them. But the moment you join one room to help a student, everyone else disappears from your view.
The short answer: On most mainstream platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, no — you cannot monitor multiple breakout rooms at once. But platforms built specifically for education handle this differently.
How Mainstream Platforms Handle Breakout Rooms
Zoom and Teams were designed for business meetings. Their breakout room feature was added as a way to split a large meeting into smaller discussion groups temporarily. The assumption is that participants are adults who can manage themselves for a few minutes.
In this model, the host doesn't need to monitor — they just need to manage. Create the rooms, assign people, set a timer, bring everyone back. Simple.
But education doesn't work that way. Students — especially younger ones — need guidance. They go off-topic. They get stuck. They need a teacher who can see what's happening and step in at the right moment.
The one-room-at-a-time limitation makes this nearly impossible. As we explored in our article on why teachers are looking for alternatives, this fundamental design choice creates real problems for tutoring institutions.
What Teachers Actually Need
Think about a physical classroom. A teacher supervising group work can see all the tables at once. They notice when a group looks confused. They hear when a conversation goes off-topic. They can walk over at exactly the right moment.
Online, teachers need the same capabilities:
- A dashboard showing all rooms at once
- Visual indicators of who's talking, who's silent, who has their camera on
- The ability to hear multiple rooms simultaneously
- Quick movement between rooms without losing the overview
This is exactly what breakout room monitoring should look like — and it's what we built Simpleclass to do.
How Simpleclass Handles Multi-Room Monitoring
Simpleclass was designed from the ground up for tutoring institutions and language schools. Our approach to breakout rooms is fundamentally different.
See all rooms at once: The teacher dashboard shows every breakout room in a single view. You can see who's in each room, who's speaking, and who's been quiet — all without joining any room.
Hear multiple rooms: You can enable audio from several rooms simultaneously. Experienced teachers quickly learn to focus on the room that needs attention, just like in a physical classroom.
Join invisibly: When you do want to enter a room, you can choose to join invisibly. Students don't know you're there, so they keep working naturally. This is perfect for authentic assessment.
Stay aware while helping: Even when you're actively helping one group, you maintain visibility of the other rooms. No more blind spots.
Why This Matters for Tutoring Institutions
For tutoring centers and language schools, breakout rooms aren't a brief activity — they're the core product. Small group work is where the learning happens.
Parents pay for professional tutoring because they expect their children to receive attention throughout the session. Not just during the brief moments when a teacher happens to check on their room.
Multi-room monitoring isn't a nice-to-have feature. For education, it's essential.
The Bottom Line
If you're using a general-purpose video platform for teaching, you're probably stuck with one-room-at-a-time visibility. That's not a bug in those platforms — it's just not what they were designed for.
If simultaneous breakout room monitoring matters to your teaching, look for a platform built specifically for education. The difference in your daily workflow — and your students' experience — is significant.