Accomplishment-Driven Leaders Cultivate Changes in Practice

In this episode, we talk about how an accomplishment-driven leader rethinks professional development (learning) moving this away from just an event on a calendar to a specific series of decisions and tools to grow adult capacity realizing the desired change in practice. These accomplisment-drive leaders reacognize the powerful combination of seminar learning, performane learning, and team learning to ensure that educators have the support they need to learn and grow.

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About the Podcast

The Wheelhouse

Where Each Student is Distinctive and Irreplaceable

The Wheelhouse exists to create an inclusive community of empowered educators who believe that, together, we can disrupt the transactional herding nature of schooling to create districts, schools, and classrooms where each student feels confident, optimistic, capable, well-supported, and emboldened to be and to become who they are meant to be.

Guiding Principles
1. We are steadfastly committed to each learner and each educator believing they are distinctive and irreplaceable.
2. We believe that educating our children should be a humanizing, relational, and transformational endeavor. All else is secondary.
3. We believe that dignity is a birthright; it is not earned. Each child deserves a future filled with open doors and unlimited possibilities. Our work is in service to this central aspiration.
4. We believe that each human life is unique and precious; as such we are compelled to remove aspects of schooling that disregard any student’s dignity.

About your hosts

Grant Chandler

Dr. Grant A. Chandler is the architect of a coherent educational ecosystem designed to eliminate drift and align systems around student dignity, clarity, and humanity. He is the lead author of Powerful Student Care: Honoring Each Learner as Distinctive & Irreplaceable (ASCD, 2023) and the Founder and CEO of Students Matter, LLC.
Through Students Matter, Dr. Chandler has developed an integrated body of work that includes Tactical Leadership, Powerful Student Care, and Future Ready Schools: Innovation Rooted in Humanity — frameworks designed to produce measurable improvement in instruction, coherence in adult systems, and visibly different classroom experiences for students.
He is also the host of The Wheelhouse, now in its twelfth season, where he explores the daily leadership choices that determine whether innovation deepens learning or becomes theater.
With more than 35 years in education — including roles as teacher, administrator, academic dean, executive coach, and national technical assistance provider — Dr. Chandler has partnered with more than 350 districts to design systemic, capacity-building approaches that move beyond initiatives and toward aligned human systems. For over a decade, he has also served as faculty with ISTE+ASCD Custom Learning Services.
His work centers on a singular conviction: systems do not improve until adults think differently and when adults align around clarity and dignity, students thrive.
Contact him at grantchandler@ourstudentsmatter.org or www.linkedin.com/in/grant-a-chandler.

Katherin Mohney

Kathy Mohney continues as an inspiring voice and thinker on The Wheelhouse since she began in Season 4. Katherin is a veteran educational leader having served as a local superintendent, a local state and federal program officer, and as a technical service provider for local districts in additional to her work as an elementary teacher, , instructional coach, principal, and consultant. Kathy strongly advocates for each student, understanding that a high-quality education is the foundation for having more opportunities beyond their K-12 education. Kathy earned her Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from Western Michigan University and her Master’s in Educational Leadership from Michigan State University. In her spare time, Kathy enjoys spending time with her husband, daughter, son-in-law, son, and her two fur babies.

Michael Pipa

Mike is a 36-year veteran educator. Before joining the CASDA faculty, he worked as an administrator at both the high school and middle school levels. Prior to his administrative career, Mike taught English Language Arts in middle and high school, achieving National Board Certification in 2006. He has worked extensively in support of students at risk as well as led his building’s professional development efforts.

Mike has worked as an instructional and administrative coach supporting staff in several area schools.

Alicia Monroe

Alicia Monroe, EdD, is a PK–20 experienced educator, international education consultant, and career coach. She has served as a teacher, supervisor, assistant principal, principal, assistant superintendent, and adjunct professor. Her notable success in creating a culture of belonging and achievement in schools along with her expertise in developing equity and access models that frame educational opportunities for all students are the core of the ongoing professional learning and support she provides to school districts.

Dr. Monroe teaches undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral courses in Africana Studies and education at a state university. Her partnership with the Office of Accessibility Services and Center for Neurodiversity has provided for collaborative planning, mentoring, career coaching, and internship and job placement for diversability students and alumni.

Dr. Monroe is the CEO and founder of Solutions for Sustained Success, LLC. Through her private practice, she serves as national faculty for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). The whole child/whole student/whole educator framework that she was instrumental in designing is a trademark of ASCD.