About

Ellen Deutscher is the founder of Empathy 2 Action, an educational consultancy with a focus on Human-Centered Design and Creativity. Before that, Ellen spent over 20 years teaching public school in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2018-2019, Ellen created and taught a Design Thinking program for the Vanke Meisha Academy in Shenzhen, China and developed and taught a Design Thinking course for a new minor in the Learning Science and Human Development Department at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 2011, Ellen began her Design Thinking journey at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school) where she was a Teacher-in-Residence for two years. During that time, she experienced and learned Design Thinking through immersion in d.school culture, classes, and community. She also had the opportunity to design, facilitate, coach and teach workshops, graduate level classes, and design experiences for both the K12 Lab and the d.school as a whole.

Ellen spent two years as a Founding Coach for IDEO’s Teachers Guild and continues to collaborate with David Kelley (co-founder of IDEO and Stanford d.school). In 2012, she co-founded #dtk12chat, an active community of Design Thinking educators (preK-higher ed) around the globe. Ellen is also co-author of Design Dots: 50 Quick Ways to Integrate Design Thinking into your Language Arts Classroom.

Before leaving her classroom in 2015, Ellen created and taught a 5th-8th grade Middle School Design Thinking program and Lunchtime Maker Space. Throughout her extensive years in public school education, she has taught a wide variety of grades and subjects including 5th grade Language Arts/Social Studies and a self-designed 5th/6th grade Shakespeare class and summer camp, "Shakin' It Up with Shakespeare.”

Ellen left the classroom in 2015 to fully dedicate herself to learning, playing, iterating, and building deeper capacities for empathy with students, educators, and innovation leaders from around the globe.