Ice-breakers are activities used at the start of a teaching session or course to ‘warm up’ the group so they will feel more relaxed and comfortable with each other. Ice-breakers can serve many purposes, but are particularly important if your teaching session involves group work.

Many training courses often start with an ice-breaker focused on individual introductions, but ice-breakers can also be main activities, which may often be more suitable to information skills sessions where there may not always be time to run formal introductions.

The purpose of an ice-breaker is to break down barriers between individuals within the teaching group in order to encourage them to be more participative and engaged in the activities. This can be particularly useful whether the group members are strangers or colleagues who may feel inhibited by status or role.

One example of an introductory ice-breaker would be to break your learners into pairs and ask each learner to find out three facts about their partner – this could be routine information such as their job or course, or something a little more unusual, such as the job they wanted to have when they were a child. Each learner must then introduce their partner to the rest of the group. Be careful with this technique if you are using it to gather information to guide the content of your session – what is reported may not necessarily be accurate! Consider giving learners the chance to comment on their partner's introduction.

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