Zoom's breakout rooms are functional. Millions of teachers use them daily. But "functional" and "ideal for education" aren't the same thing.
Based on conversations with tutoring institution owners, language teachers, and online educators, here are the features teachers most commonly wish Zoom's breakout rooms had.
Multi-Room Visibility
The wish: See all breakout rooms at once without joining them.
The reality: Zoom shows you a list of room names and participants. To actually see what's happening — video feeds, who's talking, whether students are engaged — you have to join each room individually. And joining one room means leaving your overview of the others.
This is the single most common frustration. Teachers want the equivalent of standing at the front of a classroom and scanning all the group tables. Multi-room monitoring would transform how breakout activities work.
Simultaneous Audio
The wish: Hear audio from multiple rooms at the same time.
The reality: You can only hear the room you're in. There's no way to maintain audio awareness of other rooms while helping one group.
In a physical classroom, a teacher hears the general buzz of group work and can tune into specific conversations as needed. Online, joining Room A means going completely deaf to Rooms B, C, and D.
Invisible Observation
The wish: Join a room without students knowing you're there.
The reality: When you join a Zoom breakout room, everyone sees you enter. Students often change their behavior when the teacher appears — which is natural, but it means you can never see how groups work when they don't know they're being observed.
Invisible observation would allow teachers to assess authentic collaboration, not just "behaving while teacher watches" mode.
Easier Student Movement
The wish: Drag-and-drop student movement between rooms.
The reality: Moving students between rooms in Zoom requires multiple clicks and confirmation dialogs. When you need to quickly rebalance groups or move a struggling student, the interface gets in the way.
Language teachers, in particular, want to shuffle conversation partners frequently. The friction of the current interface discourages dynamic regrouping.
Activity Indicators
The wish: See at a glance which rooms are active, which are quiet, and which might need attention.
The reality: From the host view, all breakout rooms look the same. There's no indicator of audio activity, video status, or engagement level. You have to visit each room to know what's happening.
Simple indicators — "Room 2 has been quiet for 5 minutes" or "Room 4 has high audio activity" — would help teachers prioritize where to direct attention.
Better Broadcast Messages
The wish: Send voice announcements to all rooms, or push resources easily.
The reality: Zoom's broadcast message is text-only and easy to miss. Teachers can send "5 minutes remaining" but it appears as a small notification that students often don't notice.
Voice broadcast — the equivalent of announcing to the whole classroom — would be more effective for time warnings and instructions.
Why These Features Don't Exist
Zoom wasn't designed as an education platform. As we discuss in why Zoom wasn't built for education, its breakout rooms were created for business workshops where brief, self-managed group discussions are the norm.
The features teachers wish for aren't impossible to build — they just weren't prioritized because business users don't need them. Corporate workshop facilitators don't need to silently observe whether employees are staying on task.
What You Can Do
If these limitations affect your teaching, you have options:
Work around them: Some teachers use multiple devices to join different rooms simultaneously, or set very short breakout times with frequent check-ins. These workarounds help but aren't ideal.
Accept the limitations: For occasional breakout activities, the friction may be acceptable. Not every use case requires perfect tools.
Use education-focused platforms: Platforms designed for teaching — like Simpleclass — have built these features as core functionality. Multi-room monitoring, simultaneous audio, invisible observation — these are standard, not wishlist items.
The right choice depends on how central breakout rooms are to your teaching. For tutoring centers and language schools where small-group work is the primary format, purpose-built tools make a significant difference.