Beyond Small Talk: Effective Icebreakers for University Educators
This resource presents four practical icebreaker activities that build genuine peer connections within the university classroom without the usual awkwardness—each designed to support various learning goals and to be adaptable to your specific teaching context.
Each activity video demonstrates what the activity would look like in practice, explains why and when the activity works, and offers multiple variations to suit various classroom contexts.
What makes an effective icebreaker?
The video below introduces this icebreakers video resource series. It explains some common characteristics of awkwardness-inducing icebreakers and how the activities presented in this series have been designed to mitigate that awkwardness.
Journey maps
This activity asks participants to visually portray their "journey here", and there can be many ways that you ask students to interpret that prompt. Different variations then asks students to share with the whole group, with a partner, or in a poster-presentation-style format.
In this video, a group of educators test out the journey maps activity, demonstrating what it would look like in practice. Variations and adaptations are demonstrated, including for large classes and for students who might need a bit more support in the task.
Speed networking
In this activity, students talk to one person for a short amount of time and then rotate to talk to the next peer--an activity that models "speed networking" events. The topic or discussion prompt can range from more content-focused items to personal or reflective questions, depending on the learning aims.
This activity works well when the goal is for students to meet and/or talk with as many people as possible. A variation of this task can also help students improve the clarity, conciseness, or articulation of their response.
The video shows you what the default version of the activity would look like and it explains how you could vary the task for a range of cohorts (e.g., for students who might not be comfortable speaking or for large cohorts).
Classmate bingo
This activity gets students moving around and meeting their peers in order to complete their bingo board, filling in the boxes with the name of a peer who meets each characteristic. One a student fills in three boxes in a row (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally), they shout, "Bingo!"
The task can be varied to be more or less content-focused and can be adjusted for small or large classes.
Five things
In this activity, students are put into smalls groups and must find five things that everyone in the group has in common.
The video demonstrates this version of this activity and explains multiple possible variations, including ways to make the task faster, more challenging, more structured, or even more game-like.
This activity can help build cohesion and comraderie among the class. An alternate version can help illuminate the range of different perspectives and experiences among the cohort instead, and it is discussed in the video.
More information
For enquiries about this resource or the included activities, please email Samantha Marangell.
Videos produced by Video and Media, supporting excellence in teaching and research at The University of Melbourne.