This paper details a teacher-researcher effort to investigate effective instructional practices for teaching multicultural literature through a collaborative, iterative process of inquiry driven by tentative, theoretical principles. The study began with a distillation of recent scholarship on multicultural literature response into a set of principles for instructional practice. The study was grounded in the paradigm of Design-Based Research; the specific methods were inspired by the Japanese professional development practice of lesson study. In this paper, each of the teachers reflects on his or her experiences of working with the shared principles, collaborating with others on lesson plans for his or her classroom, and learning from the experiences of other teachers in other school contexts. In synthesising the teachers' experiences, this paper argues that design-based research across teaching contexts holds promise as a method for studying English pedagogy and for professional development of teachers.