Three fields. Twenty years of research. One convergent answer.

Core Finding

"Training by itself seems to be an ineffective approach to implementation. The 'train and hope' approach does not appear to work."

After reviewing hundreds of experimental studies across health, mental health, education, and social services, Fixsen and colleagues found a consistent pattern: professional development changes what practitioners know, but rarely changes what they do. The gap between knowledge and practice is not closed by better training. It is closed by organizational systems that make trained behavior easier to perform than old behavior.

Why It Matters for MTSS

Districts invest significantly in MTSS competency drivers — selecting staff, providing training, and attempting to scale coaching. What's systematically missing is the organizational driver tier: systems interventions that embed MTSS practice into daily workflow, decision support data that makes implementation visible, and facilitative administration that removes barriers to practice. Without these, training consistently fails to transfer.

Trellis solves this

Trellis is the organizational driver — the systems intervention — that converts MTSS training into daily classroom practice. Intervention trellises surface trained strategies in real time. Timestamped documentation creates decision support data. Admin dashboards give facilitative leadership the visibility to coach and support implementation fidelity.

Core Finding

"Since the studies also revealed that day-to-day classroom assessment was relatively rare, we felt that considerable improvements would result from supporting teachers in developing this aspect of their practice."

Black and Wiliam's review of 250 studies found that formative assessment — assessment designed to inform next instructional moves rather than assign grades — dramatically accelerates learning. But it also found that this kind of assessment almost never happens in daily practice. Not because teachers don't believe in it. Because the documentation and reflection burden makes it unsustainable alongside the demands of actual instruction.

The Actionable Feedback Problem

Wiliam distinguishes between feedback and formative assessment: "Feedback is formative only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner in improving performance." Most teacher feedback is vague, delayed, or delivered alongside grades, which research shows completely cancels the benefit of any accompanying diagnostic comment. What's needed is specific, in-the-moment feedback tied directly to actionable next steps.

Trellis solves this

Trellis makes day-to-day formative assessment take five seconds. The five-color scale captures nuanced understanding (not binary right/wrong). When a student is marked below standard, the intervention trellis surfaces specific, actionable strategies, not vague feedback. Documentation happens in real time, not from memory at 5:00 PM.

Core Finding

"At the Collaborative Impact Conference 2017, John Hattie presented collective teacher efficacy as the 'new number one influence' on student achievement, with an outstanding effect size of d = 1.57."

Zhou synthesizes 20 years of research showing that collective teacher efficacy — the shared belief among faculty that they can collectively impact student learning — is a more powerful predictor of student achievement than any individual teaching practice, socioeconomic factor, or prior achievement. Yet despite its importance, Zhou notes that "we understand near to nothing about how collective efficacy forms at schools."

How Collective Efficacy Actually Forms

Bandura's foundational work identifies four sources of efficacy beliefs: mastery experiences (most powerful, explaining 80% of variance), vicarious experiences (seeing colleagues succeed), social persuasion (being told you can), and affective states (emotional readiness). For collective efficacy to form, schools need infrastructure that creates shared mastery experiences — visible evidence that their collective efforts are working.

Trellis solves this

Trellis creates the mastery experience infrastructure that Zhou identifies as the primary source of collective efficacy. Every documented intervention is evidence of collective capability. PLC dashboards make each teacher's success visible to colleagues. Shared intervention data creates the vicarious learning and social persuasion that build school-wide belief: "We know how to help our students."