The present paper is part of the German research project „Multilingualism as a field of action in intercultural school development” (MIKS), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education Research (2013-2019). By providing professionalisation programmes, MIKS supports 18 primary schools, with high linguistic diversity, in integrating translanguaging approaches. Teachers are encouraged to use those concepts as well as their own expertise and experiences so they can both tailor the prescribed concepts to their own local challenges and give new scientific input about opportunities and challenges in praxis when using prescribed translanguaging ideas (as in García & Kleyn, 2016). The focus of this paper is on factors favouring a successful intercultural school development process by examining the role of multipliers and their collaboration with project-school staff. Methods: The data analysed in the present paper includes 1) a school personal questionnaire, conducted among teachers before the professionalisation programme started, both in intervention schools (N=287), and in schools not taking part in the programme (N=423), 2) interviews with school principals, 3) questionnaires for multipliers – those who guided the professionalisation in schools, 4) observations from daily teaching in four of the 18 intervention schools. We adopted the qualitative framework of phenomenology as it is most suitable for understanding various perspectives concerning a single phenomenon, which, in the context of the present article, refers to translanguaging as pedagogy (Creswell, Hanson, Plano, & Morales, 2007; Groenewald, 2004; Starks & Trinidad, 2007). Results and conclusions: The first results show that schools find many ways to include languages, but in highly varying degrees: differences were observed both within and between schools. Challenges vary from children who are bored with the multilingual welcome song to strong teacher fluctuation, challenging classroom management or changing priorities. Promising were the multiple multilingual solutions teachers came up with themselves and the open attitude of most of the school principals. Teachers and principals expressed insecurity, for example, when students, especially in the Roma-student group, could not agree upon the “correct” translation of words and sentences in their own language. The results can be used to further develop and establish approaches to multilingual school development, such as translanguaging, and to evaluate how these are put into action concretely and the implications for the challenges and prospects in using multilingualism as a resource for teaching and learning.

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