Icebreakers and Energizers

Icebreakers are interactive warm-up activities that take place at the start of your session while energisers are used during the session in order to break the pace and regain your participants’ attention. Both activities help construct a productive learning environment by enabling participants to become more active and engaged.

Icebreakers

Icebreakers can be an effective way for your participants to get to know each other, form bonds, and spark conversations. They can also serve as a great way to familiarise participants with a digital training tool you will be using during the session or to get them to start thinking about some of the session’s main topics. You should choose and/or design an icebreaker based on your session’s needs. If your primary goal is collaborative work, consider adding an icebreaker helps create a common sense of purpose. If you want the participants to utilise a certain tool during the session, craft an icebreaker around it so they become comfortable using it.

Examples:

• Show and tell: Give everyone 30 seconds to find an object around them that says something about their preferences/personality. They can showcase the object on camera and tell the group what it says about them. This can help participants feel more connected to their peers and more comfortable contributing in upcoming discussions.
• Where are we? If you will be using Mural and want participants to get used to the tool, you can add this icebreaker to your session. Create a board with a world map, ask everyone to write their name on a sticky note and add it to the world map according to their location. Ask the participants to introduce themselves, mention the city they’re in and tell the group why they like it in a sentence or two. Then, you can ask everyone to move their sticky notes to where they wish they could be right now and talk a bit about that.
• Getting to know each other: Ask participants before the session to select a picture that tells something about themselves, their situation or their country. Encourage the participants to set their picture as their background picture on Zoom, invite the group to have a look around and start a chat conversation with the person they would like to know more about. Ask them to exchange in the chat on 3 things: their favourite thing to do, their biggest failure and (e.g.) what being able to claim your rights means to them. After a few minutes, in plenary, ask a few participants to share what they learned about their partner.

Energisers

Energisers can be particularly useful in online sessions since maintaining the energy and attention of your remote attendees is key. You can introduce an energiser if you feel like your participants are distracted, tired, or would simply benefit from a pick-me-up.

Examples:

• Emoji energiser: Before the session, come up with a list of key phrases and sentences that you will use in the first part of the session. Then, when you want to energise the group, write a phrase into one participant’s private chat and ask them to write it in emoji for the group to guess. This activity tends to generate laughter but also helps cement the key ideas for the participants.
• Nostalgic musical challenge: On Mural, ask everyone to add a picture of the first song/album they bought or remember listening to. Ask the participants to share a bit more about where they bought or heard the song, what format it was in, why they liked it at the time. Then, after the session, you can use the mural to make a playlist with everyone’s choices and share it with the group.