The iLab at the San Francisco Unified School District

• How can we cultivate a culture of academic excellence among African-American female students?
• How can we engage teachers in data-informed conversations to accelerate student academic growth?
• How can we transform teacher and family relationships?

These are just some of the challenges being addressed through the iLab initiative at the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)—one of the largest efforts in the United States to apply design thinking as a human-centered problem-solving approach in K–12 education.

The overall goal of the iLab is to build institution-wide, strategic human-centered innovation capacity across the entire District. Over a two-year period, IntoActions worked closely with the iLab program team to help SFUSD put design thinking into action, refine its human-centered innovation methodology, and strengthen its innovation coaching and implementation model at scale.

Promoting Innovation Across an Entire Organization

At IntoActions, we are passionate about working closely with our partners to help them identify unique insights related to the challenges they are trying to solve—and to transform those insights into compelling ideas. But we don’t stop there.

As the name IntoActions suggests, we work with partners to turn innovative ideas into action. Innovation, in our view, means more than coming up with a good idea. It means taking ideas home, trying them out, refining them, and embedding them into daily practice. For innovation to take hold, structures and processes must be established to promote innovation systemically across an entire organization—not just within isolated teams.

The iLab was established as part of SFUSD’s strategic plan Vision 2025, a district-wide effort engaging hundreds of stakeholders—teachers, administrators, students, families, community-based organizations, and academic experts. The iLab was envisioned as “a space, a process, and a resource” to promote innovation so that all SFUSD students graduate ready to thrive in the 21st century.

This top-down strategic commitment has been matched by growing bottom-up interest from educators eager to design and implement innovative approaches to real, day-to-day challenges.

A Shared Framework, Language, Process, and Support System

SFUSD’s Design Thinking Framework

SFUSD’s Design Process draws on proven methods from IDEO.org, the Stanford d.school, and IntoActions and is organized around four interconnected areas and phases that constantly interact with each other: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver.

• Discover: During the Discover phase, teams explore and begin to understand the problem space by engaging deeply with students, teachers, families, and other stakeholders.
• Define: The Define phase brings clarity to complexity by synthesizing observations, identifying needs, and generating unique insights. This phase helps teams to (re)define what the real problem is.
• Develop: The Develop phase pushes teams to use a wide range of ideation tools and methods to generate many possible solution pathways.
• Deliver: Finally, the Deliver phase requires teams to build, test, and refine the most promising solutions in real-world contexts.

Throughout the process, activities continually alternate between the problem space and the solution space, with increasing levels of fidelity. Through rapid and repeated prototyping, ideas quickly move from the abstract to the concrete and are transformed into tangible solutions. Failure is encouraged at any point, as many of the best solutions begin with surprise and learning from what did not work as expected.

Training and Coaching

Shortly before the school year began, project teams committed to attending a Bootcamp, a short hands-on introduction to the Design Thinking Process. The Bootcamp was followed by four Design Sessions during September and October, culminating in the end of the first phase with a Pitch Night in November, where the teams presented their solution.

Each team was assigned an iLab Coach, a facilitator trained in human-centered design principles and processes, who supports the team throughout the design process. iLab Coaches might be experienced ‘design thinkers’ from within the District, as well as external design experts. iLab Coaches had access to weekly coaching “office hours” with the iLab leadership team. After Pitch Night, iLab Coaches continued to work with their teams during the implementation phase, though less regularly.

Innovation Space

Space matters! Space defines desired behaviors and shapes desired learning. The physical space used for the iLab project is a key instrument in fostering innovation and collaboration. For this initiative, SFUSD converted four classrooms at the Thurgood Marshall Academic High School into a stage for creative team collaboration. Flexible furniture, prototyping tools and materials, visualization aids and other elements encourage teams to take a playful approach to creative problem-solving.

Some teams decided to work at their own school rather than using the iLab space. While there are some advantages to working in their own space, teams might miss out on the unique affordances of the iLab space and the energy of being located in the same space as other design teams.

Additional Resources and Requirements

Each team invited to participate in the iLab project received prototyping funds ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. After presenting their solutions during Pitch Night and submitting an implementation plan and budget, teams also received implementation funds averaging $10,000. Faculty and staff team members are also granted paid time off for their work on the innovation project.

The Stanford University Graduate School of Education was also engaged as a research partner. Stanford graduate students and faculty were conducting research to assess the impact and effectiveness of the iLab project.

Having coached school teams throughout multiple phases of the iLab initiative provided IntoActions with a unique perspective into how district-level strategy, shared frameworks, and coaching structures translate into sustained innovation at the school level.

Case Study: Increasing Engagement in Learning for All Students

César Chávez Elementary School

One example of the iLab in action is César Chávez Elementary School, located in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District—a historically working-class Hispanic neighborhood undergoing rapid gentrification. The school is designated as one of SFUSD’s Historically Underserved Schools, with close to 80% of students identified as English language learners. Over 80% of students come from low-income families, and 24% have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).

The Challenge

A persistent challenge at César Chávez has been finding effective ways to increase engagement in learning for all students. Many students perform below grade level and easily become discouraged or disengaged. Compounding this are external stressors, including fear of displacement or deportation.

While the value of collaborative and project-based learning (PBL) was well understood and discussed among staff, the practical challenge of designing and implementing group work that truly engages all learners—across grades and classrooms—remained significant.

The Design Team & Process

The six-member design team included the school principal, a curriculum and technology integration specialist (who served as team lead), and four classroom teachers representing all grade levels. After an intensive two-month design deep dive, the team spent the remainder of the school year testing, refining, and implementing their solution, supported throughout by an experienced design thinking coach.

By engaging students, teachers, and families, the team surfaced a key insight: students were most engaged when learning culminated in shared celebrations. Opportunities to collaborate and publicly share learning—inside and outside of school—dramatically increased motivation and engagement.

The Solution: Learning Showcases as a Catalyst for PBL

The team identified Learning Showcases as a powerful vehicle to infuse project-based learning across grade levels. Learning Showcases provided a clear entry point, a shared purpose for teachers, and a meaningful audience for students.

Innovation Award funding enabled release time for grade-level teams to plan and implement several Learning Showcase prototypes at the end of the school year. Student engagement, enthusiasm, and joy of learning were noticeably stronger.

Preliminary Impact & Moving Forward

All classrooms incorporated project-based learning elements into their final writing spiral. Teachers reported increased collaboration across grade-level teams, more hands-on learning, greater student choice, and higher levels of creativity and engagement.

• 75% of teachers reported that their final spiral project went well or very well
• 91% of teachers reported that students were engaged or very engaged

As one teacher noted, “The teamwork and application of new learning was really cool,” while others described “lots of great collaboration… and kids making connections across classrooms.”

Building on these early successes, César Chávez plans to expand Learning Showcases in the following school year, working with internal and external partners—including the Buck Institute for Education—and integrating principles from Complex Instruction, a Stanford-based approach designed to promote equity and engagement in heterogeneous classrooms.

From Individual Schools to Institution-Wide Change

The César Chávez case illustrates how sustained, multi-year investment in human-centered design—supported by shared language, coaching, leadership commitment, and enabling structures—can help a large public school district build lasting innovation capacity.

Through its two-year collaboration with the iLab, IntoActions supported SFUSD in moving beyond isolated innovation projects toward institution-wide, strategic human-centered innovation, grounded in the realities of classrooms, schools, and communities.

Photo Gallery

Featured Image: Image Credit: © IntoActions. Photo by Reinhold Steinbeck