Awardees
Multilingual by Design awardees will each receive $350,000 to build and test AI tools that help teachers support multilingual students. In 2026-2027, they will pilot their tools with teachers in Colorado, Massachusetts and Wisconsin.
Alongside their grants, the teams will receive coaching, technical assistance and go-to-market support throughout the coming year, with the goal of building tools that can reach classrooms well beyond their pilot sites.
Throughline Learning, a Providence-based nonprofit that partners with school districts on AI implementation, will provide technical assistance and lead research on the pilots, helping teams use a common set of measures to understand how their tools are working for teachers and students. Multilingual by Design will continue to share what the teams learn with educators, developers and funders across the field.
Content and Language with AI (CLAI)
Integrating AI to support small-group math talk
CLAI gives teachers a live, at-a-glance view of small-group student discussions. Building on real-time transcription and translation, the tool recognizes when students are using key learning concepts or ideas from home life – and where they may be struggling, flagging moments that call for a response. A teacher who doesn't share a student's first language can quickly see where that student needs support. Students are in control of their own audio recordings, which are stored locally and stay under district control. CLAI will be piloted with six teachers in rural, suburban, and urban school districts in Wisconsin.
Medley Studio
Customizing instructional materials to meet multilingual students’ needs
Building on their partnership in the Cooney Center Sandbox, Medley Learning and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center will will team up to design Medley Studio, which helps teachers adapt the grade-level materials they already use to better support multilingual learners, quickly adding research-backed, proficiency-aligned scaffolds like shorter text chunks and in-context definitions. Teachers can review and customize recommended supports, then export or print classroom-ready materials – reducing planning time while preserving rigorous, grade-level instruction. Their pilot will focus on five schools in Taunton, Massachusetts; Medley currently serves 12,000 students across 48 school systems.
Premo
Adapting high-quality instructional materials with language in mind
Premo uses AI to help teachers plan and adapt grade-level math lessons so multilingual learners can engage with rigorous content while building academic language. Designed to support adoption of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), the tool aligns each lesson to established English language development frameworks and suggests ready-to-use supports and teaching strategies matched to each student's English proficiency level. DSST will pilot the tool in its network of 16 public middle and high schools in Denver and Aurora, where more than 65% of students are current or former multilingual learners.