Drawing on formative evaluation data gathered for a project on the education of girls in Northern India, this paper argues for the importance of assessing initial program effects to be able to explain ultimate results. Without such analyses, explanations of results are impoverished; consequently, lessons learned and shared with other project designers will not fully describe how the theory of change embedded in a project actually worked. The paper presents data on the effects of initial training on teachers, showing how that training provided important opportunities to learn new knowledge, attitudes, and practices that were enacted in the classroom. We argue that this is a crucial step towards the ultimate results of girls’ improved retention and completion of primary school, one that evaluation strategies must capture to be able to intelligently explain ultimate outcomes.