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Our Chief Academic Officer, Bryan LeBlanc has spent 14+ years turning good teachers into great ones, and great schools into places where every student is educated as an individual. He built his career at the intersection of the classroom and the boardroom: a working science teacher who also shaped how an university prepares the next generation of educators.

 

As Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Nicholls State University, Bryan didn't just teach methods courses, he ran the machinery behind them. He served as Assessment Coordinator, Title II Coordinator, and Coordinator of Clinical Experiences, sitting on the Curriculum Committee, the Accreditation Quality Assurance Team, and the Quality Enhancement Plan Committee. He knows what accreditors look for, what boards demand, and what actually moves the needle in a classroom, because he's led all three.

 

That expertise is published. Bryan authored Methods of Instruction with Kendall Hunt, a textbook now shaping how new teachers are trained. He's presented at LERA on the tension every teacher feels between scripted curriculum and professional autonomy, and his doctoral research examined how well teachers are truly prepared to meet the literacy demands baked into today's academic standards.

 

Before the university, Bryan was in the trenches as an Instructional Coach and Curriculum Site Specialist across two Terrebonne Parish schools, coaching teachers on standards-based instruction and using classroom data to drive decisions, and before that, a math teacher and mentor teacher himself. He's never lost the classroom perspective, which is why he most recently taught sixth-grade chemistry at Basis Ed Charter Schools of Louisiana before leaving the classroom to build THAT! Academy for Growth full-time.

 

That range, classroom teacher, mentor, instructional coach, university professor, accreditation leader, published author, is exactly why THAT! Academy for Growth exists. Bryan built it to hand educators and school leaders the same tools he's used at every level of the system: practical, standards-based, data-driven strategies that work in a real classroom on a Monday morning and hold up under an accreditation review. He holds a Master's Degree plus 30 additional graduate hours in Curriculum and Instruction from Nicholls State University, earned as an Honor Graduate, and is currently completing his Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in Curriculum and Instruction as an Honor Candidate.

 

That's Bryan LeBlanc. That's THAT! Academy for Growth.

 

Now THAT! makes sense.