Wild Tea / Mad Tea Party

Activity

Liberating Structures, Warm up activities

Wild Tea / Mad Tea Party

Maha Bali

This activity promotes small group intimacy and collaboration, making a large group session feel interactive.

Tech needed: Breakout rooms

Duration: 5-30 mins

Student preparation: None

Educator preparation: None

ACTIVITY PURPOSE

To energise students and help them connect with classmates through quick, rotating conversations. This activity encourages speaking, listening, and building a sense of community – ideal for starting classes or group work sessions.

USEFUL FOR

Energising participants at the beginning of a meeting or class, giving them opportunities to talk to each other in pairs or trios (for the breakout room version) or hearing from the whole class quickly (for the text chat version).
Using the breakout room version can also help prime participants for structured/timed activities later on that require concise answers and care in making space for others to speak during a limited timeframe.

PREPARATION

Slides with prompts written on them.

INSTRUCTIONS

Prepare slides with prompts that are completing a sentence, such as “the best thing that happened to me last semester was…” or “Lately, my priority has been…” or “one superpower I have.” or “a challenge I need help with is…” Make sure some of the prompts are positive/hopeful.
Explain to participants that this is an energising but slightly dizzying activity, and that it uses breakout rooms. Let them know if they find themselves alone in a breakout room that they can return to the main room.
Screenshare your slides to show the first prompt.
Split participants into random breakout rooms in pairs or trios. If you do pairs, usually 2 minutes per round is enough. If trios, 3 minutes.
Decide how many rounds you will do, depending on time. Between each round and the other, when people return to the main room, read out and show on screenshare the new prompt, then recreate breakout rooms randomly/automatically so people are likely to end up with a different partner.
After all rounds are over, ask participants how they felt.

DURATION

This activity takes about 2-3 minutes per prompt, and can work well for anything from 3-6 rounds or so.

If you do the breakout room version, make sure to bring people back quickly from rooms (e.g. give them only 15 secs notice) to be able to send them back out again quickly.
If people complain the time is too tight, give them an extra minute for the next prompt.

ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES

This activity can be done via text chat without break out rooms. Just ask participants to respond to the prompt concisely in the text chat and read some/all of their responses aloud. If you have time, and participants are willing, you can call on some to elaborate aloud quickly on what they wrote.
If you want to use this for a more focused activity, instead of varying prompts between rounds, you can do “impromptu networking” (a classic Liberating Structure) where you have several rounds in different groups, but the same 1-2 prompts each time. So each person gets to repeat to 1-2 other people the same thing, and listen to different responses to the prompt in small groups. But give them 2 mins per person to respond.
If you are using breakout rooms but some participants are having connectivity issues, keep them in the main room and let them respond to the prompt together or with you.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Slides with prompts on them so participants can see as well as hear the prompts. Feel free to adapt the sSlides used in the demo video
Can use breakout rooms or text chat.