Dear Melinda,
In our team we regularly run complex sessions with breakouts in Teams - it does require some extra work/pairs of hands compared to zoom, but it can be done very effectively.
The main principal is creating several simultaneous meetings without 'lobbies', and calling these 'breakout 1, breakout 2 etc.'. You then need to copy the urls for these meetings and hyperlink them into the corresponding text 'breakout 1, breakout 2 etc.' You can then paste this hyperlinked text into the chat in your main teams meeting so that when people click on the text 'breakout 1', for example, it will take them into a separate meeting titled 'breakout 1'.
The main difficulty is is making sure that people come back into the main meeting when the round of breakouts is over. To do this you want to make sure that you have opened up the chats for each of the breakout rooms in your chats area on teams in advance. When the time comes, you can then send a link back to the main session into each of the chats in each breakout room (you will need to make sure to let participants know to press 'resume' when returning to the main session too).
This article gives the basics for this : . (Note that here they use a live document, such as google docs, as a place to keep the agenda with all the room links. You can do this, but we prefer to post the links to the breakout rooms into the chat so that it becomes one click for participants to join the breakout.)
Also, breakout rooms should soon be coming as a function in Teams so it may not be that much longer that it requires this extra bit of work.
Hope that helps for starters!
Tom
