Melissa Pelochino
Academic Dean, East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy
Melissa Pelochino was a literacy specialist at an East Palo Alto junior high school when she came to the d.school for a weekend workshop offered by our K-12 lab. The next week, she created her own design thinking prototype in her classroom, using the process to engage her students in their assigned reading. She assigned a design challenge, then asked the students to use their readings as a way to gain empathy and identify needs, then design and test a prototype. Melissa’s students were the school’s most struggling readers, some reading at a first or second grade level. After six months of design challenges, her students had grown an average of two whole grade levels in their reading. Melissa is now an Academic Dean at East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy, run by the non-profit Aspire organization. She’s helped spread design thinking within the school and throughout Aspire, which is one of the highest performing school systems in the state of California.
