Reasons to Write Rhymes with Rob Bradley

World championship winning freestyle rapper Rob Bradley gave an interactive hybrid workshop where he rapped and read poetry.

Sixty pupils and seven teachers from one partnership school experienced the workshop on-site. Over 1500 pupils from over 50 schools experienced the workshop via the live-stream.

Aims

To share an engaging and educational workshop with our partner primary schools for their pupils in Y5. This interactive workshop involved wordplay, rhyme and following the rhythm of the music.

Background

This workshop was part of the GSAL Presents series.

GSAL started offering life-streamed workshops during lockdown and realised this was a convenient way to reach more pupils with engaging and educational content relevant to their curriculum.

GSAL has been running workshops for primary schools for more than nine years and running live-streamed workshops since 2020.

Resources

Workshops offered for free.

To reach the maximum involvement from partnership schools, we needed to offer the following:

1. An effective workshop facilitator who could inspire and engage pupils in the assembly hall as well as those live-streaming from their classrooms;

2. A venue (the GSAL assembly hall) and transport (GSAL transport 70-seater bus) available to partnership schools if they chose to experience the workshop live; and

3. Technical expertise (Actual Pixels) to deliver a successful life broadcast and recording that could be available afterwards on the GSAL Presents webpage.

Impact

Quantitative:

In addition to two Y5 classrooms from one school attending the workshop live at GSAL, an estimated 1500 pupils watched via livestream. This figure is based on the 54 individual classrooms that logged on to Zoom webinar and the average of 30 pupils per classroom. One school contacted GSAL expressing intention to livestream the workshop to their entire KS2 cohort of pupils.

 In the first activity, when Rob asked for word suggestions from the live and virtual audience for his freestyle rap, over 40 words were suggested through Zoom’s Q&A service. Many words were also sent over the chat service, but those were not automatically captured by Zoom.

At the end of the workshop, when pupils asked questions, 12 questions were asked over Zoom’s Q&A service. Many questions were also sent over the chat service, but those were not automatically captured by Zoom.

Qualitative:

Feedback via email and responses on Facebook and Twitter showed enthusiasm for the workshops. In emails, teachers used words like ‘inspirational’ to describe their classroom’s reaction to the workshop.

Pupil Involvement

Pupil watched the workshop, suggested words for the freestyle rap, were involved in call-and-response poetry, and asked questions at the end.

Most pupils were in Y5, though some schools included other school years.

Frequency

GSAL offers workshops with its partnership schools approximately once per term.