Education research and design
Partnering with education leaders to build the conditions for student flourishing.
Treetops helps schools, and the organizations that prepare and support their teachers and leaders, design new models and programs, pilot them well, and measure what matters, so your vision becomes real in classrooms.
Why now
The world we all live and work in keeps changing. Most schools haven’t.
Four shifts are changing how all of us learn, work, and live together:
Technological innovation
Students and adults alike now carry tools more powerful than any generation before them. That brings real risk and real opportunity, and it is pushing education to rethink not only how people learn, but what they learn.
Human connection
Loneliness and hopelessness are rising among young people, and technology has changed how young people and adults alike relate to one another. Relating well is now an intelligence schools can’t leave to chance.
Economic opportunity
More than half of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940, and AI is speeding up the change for students and the adults who teach them. Durable human skills, and the habit of learning, now matter more than any single career path.
Public life
Communities are growing more diverse and more divided, and they face shared challenges, from extreme weather to fraying trust in institutions and in one another. Learning to understand each other and work through hard problems together is now essential work for schools.
Adding a course or a technology policy won’t meet this moment. Schools, and the programs that support their educators, need to be redesigned on firmer ground: research on how young people develop and flourish, learning science on how people learn best, employer evidence on the durable skills that drive economic mobility, and on-the-ground data from your own school or organization.
How Treetops helps
Most partners help you plan, design, or measure. Treetops connects all three.
Whether you’re building a new school model, a teacher or leader development program, or a strategy, the work goes better when purpose, design, and evidence are built together, so what you launch is grounded in research and tested from day one.
Purpose
What are we trying to build?
Strategy and direction for schools and organizations, grounded in evidence and your local context.
Design
How do we build it?
Human-centered design: start with the students, families, and educators who will live the design, then prototype and test, grounded in what research shows helps people flourish.
Evidence
How do we know it’s working?
Pilots designed to learn from, and progress monitoring systems that show over time what’s working, so strategy keeps getting sharper.
What Treetops brings that’s hard to do alone
Deep training in research design, from randomized controlled trials to interviews and focus groups, plus improvement science. Evidence is built into the work from day one, so you can learn and adjust in real time.
Years alongside leading organizations in teaching and learning, education-to-work pathways, and school redesign, and a clear sense of how the parts of the system fit together.
Graduate training and years of work on how young people grow: belonging, agency, relationships, and durable skills, and how they connect to academic success. Translated into practical designs for students and the adults who teach them.
Experience facilitating candid conversations with students, educators, and community partners, and managing complex, cross-sector projects. The perspective and structure your team can’t easily provide while running a school or organization.
Meet Caroline
Classroom experience. Systems-level leadership.
I started my career in the classroom, teaching English language arts in Houston and Nashville, where I helped found a new high school. Since then, I’ve worked at every level of the system: as a research analyst at the Tennessee Department of Education, as Director of Strategic Projects at the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), supporting schools and districts, and as Senior Director of Impact at the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE).
That range means I understand how the parts of the education ecosystem fit together, and how to use them to bring about lasting change for students.
The experience behind Treetops
Every engagement draws on 15 years of work across the education ecosystem.
Five commitments, every partnership.
Five principles guide how I work alongside leaders, from the first conversation to the final handoff.
Rooted in research and context
Strong work starts in the right soil.
Student- and equity-driven
Students are the reason for this work.
Systems-minded
Lasting impact requires coherence.
Collaborative and relational
Nobody grows alone.
Growth through innovation
Growth requires trying new things.
Ways to work together
Start where you are.
Begin with a diagnostic, or go straight to the question you’re facing.
Notes from the canopy.
One short letter a month on designing schools where students flourish. Tools, questions, and what I’m learning.
Let’s build toward student flourishing, together.
caroline@treetopsllc.com