Empowering Teachers through Design Thinking: Developing Learning Prototypes for Multilingual Students

Abstract

This paper argues that developing teachers’ design literacy will enable them to better respond to the demands of their work in schools. Our approach involves partnering with teachers and other educators through professional development. They learn design thinking tools from us and apply them to a problem faced at their schools, while we research their progress solving the problem and putting design thinking tools into practice. We present a case of schools challenged by how to support students in the process of learning English. We ask, how might teachers learn and use design thinking to develop effective supports for their multilingual students? The research team used mixed methods to gather data. Overall, we noticed our teacher-partners shift from conceptualizing language learning as vocabulary and grammatical structures, to thinking holistically about the range of challenges multilingual students face in schools. We present two teacher cases that highlight how design thinking was used to cultivate design literacy and help their students develop academic and social language skills. Our research was with elementary and middle schools, but we believe that the principles outlined in our design thinking project could extend beyond grade level and content areas.