Bridge21 How To

The lessons on this site are designed around the Bridge21 Model of Learning. You can read more about the model here.

The Bridge21 Activity Model calls for the following elements:

Clearly not all lessons can contain all elements and the investigate/plan/create sections can be contracted to address our documents based problems that require creative thinking to address.

The first two lessons are designed as introductory classes that make students aware of the nature of the evidence contained in the depositions. The second lesson ‘Using the 1641 depositions to read like a historian’ asks students in their groups to model historical reading with the same document the historian, Dr Ciarán Wallace, is reading in the guiding video.

Most of lessons begin with the classes being arranged into (teacher selected) groups and performing a brainstorming warm-up activity. Students then get to work on the lesson and at the end, come together to share, present or debate their findings. Most lessons begin with a video that introduces the topic and provides background knowledge. Then students are set a central historical question and given a number of documents to analyze with guiding questions to help them. They are then required to prepare to debate this question in class – using the answers to the guiding questions to support their arguments.

Two lessons are based on History Ireland articles and introduce a novel and active way of teaching the Plantations and the political events of the 1640s and 1650s. Students are asked to read the articles and then devise a way of teaching the content to their peers.

A number of lessons have an extension activity where students are asked to go onto the main 1641 depositions website and search for evidence themselves.