Year Zero: What Happens When a 20-Year Teacher Starts From Scratch?

I have been teaching for almost twenty years.

That sentence used to feel like a credential. Lately, it has started to feel like a question. Not in a crisis-of-confidence way, I love this job as much as I ever have, maybe more! But in a genuinely curious way. What would I do differently if I started over? What would I build if I forgot everything I had already created and started from the standards up?

This past year gave me an unexpected answer to that question.

As an academic interventionist, I spent the year teaching a little of everything to students who needed something different from what they had been getting. I built resources in the heat of the moment, not because a unit plan told me to, but because a student needed something right now and I had to figure out what that something was. It was the most creatively alive I have felt in a classroom in years.

And then I found out I was going back to social studies.

US History. World History. A traditional classroom. The full return.

My first instinct was to dig out my old lecture notes, dust off my old units, and slot everything back into place the way it had been before. My second instinct, the one I am going to listen to, was to set all of it on fire and start over.

Not because the old stuff was bad. Some of it was genuinely good. However, I'm not the same teacher anymore. My students deserve the +20 years version of me, who now knows what I know about: play, creativity, curiosity. The things that showcase what learning ought to look like when it's working.

So here is what I am doing instead.

Year Zero

I am treating next year as Year Zero. Not Year One, Year Zero. The distinction matters.

Year One implies building from scratch with beginner's confidence. Year Zero implies something more intentional: bringing twenty years of hard-won knowledge about students, learning, and what actually works, and deliberately choosing not to let that knowledge calcify into habit. Starting from the district's standards and pacing guide as the only given, building everything else fresh.

Twenty years of knowing students. Zero years of using these specific materials. That combination is the most interesting pedagogical experiment I have ever run on myself.

The philosophy is simple: every unit, every lesson, every activity gets built around play, technology, and the kind of weird instructional choices that my blog has been showcasing. If it could have been a lecture, it now becomes something else. If it could have been a worksheet, it now becomes a template. If it could be a test, it becomes a performance. The old default is no longer the default setting!

The Toolkit

Every good experiment needs good tools. Here is what I am bringing into Year Zero, organized not by alphabet but by what each one actually does in service of learning.

Creation and Publishing: Adobe Express, Canva, Genially

These three are the creative engine of the classroom. Adobe Express and Canva handle the design work: student-created zines, infographics, social media templates, and micro-media projects that turn content mastery into something worth displaying. Genially adds the interactive layer: presentations, escape rooms, and interactive images that ask students to do something rather than just look at something. Together, they give students a publishing toolkit that a professional content creator would recognize.

AI-Assisted Planning and Differentiation: Brisk Teaching, Diffit, SchoolAI

These three handle the heavy lifting of meeting students where they are. Brisk lives inside my Google Workspace and helps me give better feedback faster, generate differentiated materials, and check the AI-resiliency of assignments before I assign them. Diffit takes any text and adapts it to any reading level in seconds, which means every student gets the same content at the right entry point. SchoolAI gives students a guided AI conversation partner that keeps them thinking rather than outsourcing the thinking. All three are AI working in the service of the human in the loop, which is the only kind of AI integration I am interested in.

Student Practice and Retrieval: Knowt, Wayground, Edpuzzle

Retrieval practice is one of the most important evidence-backed learning strategies that exists, and these three tools build it into the daily rhythm of the classroom. Knowt handles spaced repetition, AI-generated study materials, and enables interactive conversations about what they are studying. Wayground, which longtime educators will recognize as the rebranded and significantly expanded Quizizz, handles gamified practice, interactive lessons, and formative data that tells me what students actually know before I find out on an assessment. Edpuzzle turns any video into an interactive lesson with embedded questions, which means Retro Report documentaries, primary source footage, and historical films become active learning experiences rather than passive ones.

Discussion and Writing: Class Companion, Curipod

These two handle the thinking-out-loud part of learning. Class Companion provides AI-supported writing practice, and students get feedback on their historical arguments in real time, which means they arrive at class discussion having already wrestled with the ideas rather than encountering them cold. Curipod generates interactive lessons with polls, word clouds, and reflection prompts that make whole-class discussion visible and inclusive rather than dominated by the same five hands.

Curation and Primary Sources: Wakelet, Retro Report

These two are about giving students access to the real thing. Wakelet lets me curate collections of primary sources, articles, videos, and resources that students can explore independently. It is the digital equivalent of a reading corner, organized by topic and available on demand. Retro Report produces short, high-quality documentary journalism that connects historical events to present-day consequences, which is exactly the kind of historical thinking I want students to do all year.

What Gets Built, Gets Shared

Everything I build for next year goes on this website! Not a curated highlight reel of the things that worked perfectly. Everything: the activities, the templates, the lesson structures, the weird experiments that paid off, and the ones that didn't quite land the way I hoped. Two dedicated resource pages, one for US History and one for World History, are organized by unit and updated as the year goes on.

If you teach social studies, these pages are being built for you as much as they are being built for my students. The whole point of teachers' plAIground has always been that the best ideas get better when they are shared — and I am about to have a lot of ideas.

Year Zero starts in August.

I cannot wait to see what gets built.