Year Zero Update: What We've Built for World History (and What's Coming Friday)
- Dustin Rimmey
- 1 minute ago
- 5 min read
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Everything I build gets shared. Two dedicated resource pages: one for US History, one for World History, updated as the year goes on. Not a highlight reel of the things that worked perfectly.
Everything!
It's August. I'm in my 2nd of 4 days of PD, and I see students for the first time on Thursday! Before the madness of Day 1 of Year 20 kicks off, I want to share a real update on what has actually been built, because the answer is more than I expected, and I am genuinely excited to share it.
The Infrastructure First
Before a single lesson could be written, something else had to exist: a system for building lessons that could scale across seven units of World History and an entire US History course without collapsing under its own weight.
That system lives in three places:
A Notion workspace serves as the central hub for both courses — World History and US History each have their own dedicated space with course overviews, curriculum maps, open loops checklists, design throughlines, and a resources and toolkit section. It is the kind of organized that feels luxurious in June and essential in September.
A Google Drive folder is organized per unit and per lesson, with subfolders already built and ready to receive content as it gets created. Every lesson plan links to the Drive file rather than embedding it — which means when I update a lesson in Drive, the Notion link stays current automatically. That linked-not-embedded pattern is a small decision that will save me significant headaches mid-semester.
Two lesson plan templates: one for single-day periods and one for flexible multi-day block scheduling to give every lesson the same consistent structure: driving question, objectives, C3 standards, vocabulary, bellringer, numbered steps, closer, extension, and a teacher reflection space. The templates exist in Word (and Google Docs) so they are editable, shareable, and not dependent on any platform staying free or accessible.
And two curriculum correlation spreadsheets map the district's seven-unit scope and sequence against the OER Project courses and TCI History Alive! chapters, with alignment gap flags for the places where the standard resources do not quite cover what the district expects. The C3 Framework correlation workbook maps every unit to the relevant D2 History indicators and assigns the process standards at the unit level to mirror the district's culminating assessment structure.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is necessary. And having it done before the first lesson was written made everything that came after significantly easier.
The Tool That Made It Possible
The primary building space for Year Zero has been a dedicated Claude project: a working environment where the curriculum context, the design decisions, the pedagogical preferences, and the work itself all live together in one place. Not a chat. Not a one-off prompt. A sustained, iterative collaboration where the AI understands the district standards, the source materials, the lesson template, and the teaching philosophy well enough to build alongside me rather than just respond to me.
This is what human-in-the-loop AI use actually looks like in practice. Not AI generating a lesson plan from a generic prompt. AI that knows the Kansas HGSS standards, the C3 Framework, the OER Project's scope and sequence, and the specific gap between what TCI covers and what the district expects, and helps me build something that accounts for all of it simultaneously.
Every lesson that ends up on the World History resource page was built that way. I want you to know that because it is both honest and important. The work is mine. The thinking is mine. The pedagogical choices are mine. The AI made the building faster, more organized, and more connected to the frameworks it needed to be connected to. That is the version of AI in education I have been arguing for all year, and Year Zero is the live experiment.
What's Been Built: Unit Zero
The first concrete deliverable from the World History project is a unit I am calling Unit Zero: Narratives and Frames — a skills-introduction unit that sits before District Unit 1 and does not replace any of the district's content. It is front-loaded skills work, adapted from the OER Project's World History Project 1200 course, designed to give students the disciplinary tools they need before they need them. I have also made the conscious decision to use this "zero" unit in my US history classes, because I want my students to have the same skill set even if there is not a true OER equivalent for US history.
Four lessons are complete:
0.1 — History Stories introduces students to the idea that history is not a collection of facts but a construction of narratives — and that who tells the story shapes what the story says.
0.2 — What Is History? moves students through scale switching, claim testing, and three-step primary source reading before zooming back in to apply those skills to a specific historical question. This lesson does the most structural work of the four and is the one I am most proud of.
0.3 — History Frames introduces the analytical lenses: social, political, economic, cultural, environmental — that students will use to examine historical events across the entire course.
0.4 — History and Memory asks students to think about what gets remembered, what gets forgotten, and why; which is the question that will follow them through every unit that comes after it.
Each lesson is built on the district template, aligned to the C3 Framework, connected to the OER source materials, and linked to the Drive files that hold the actual student-facing resources. They are not perfect. They are real. And they are being shared because that was the promise.
What's Coming
The World History resource page goes live on Friday. Unit Zero will be there, all four lessons, the lesson plan templates, and the curriculum correlation spreadsheets. Everything I described above. Free, downloadable, and built for actual classroom use rather than for looking impressive on a resource page.
US History is coming next week. That project is starting from scratch, which is exactly what Year Zero was always supposed to be, and the building is already underway.
August is almost here. The classroom is almost real. And the version of me that showed up to build this thing is more ready than I expected to be.
The promise was that everything gets shared. Friday is where we start keeping it!
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