About Norman Gaudet
Norman Gaudet is a bilingual educator and an accomplished leader with an invaluable international perspective.
As Head of School, M. Gaudet leads a team of 300+ teachers and staff members to offer the best educational experience to the 1,500 students of TFS. M. Gaudet brings his determination toward bilingual education to the school that suits its identity and vision for its future. His passion for academic ambition is felt school-wide through his innovative and informed ideas and programs.
As a proud “Fransaskois,” he began his career in education 30 years ago in the Saskatoon public school system as a Gifted Education Specialist. For the past 20 years, he worked in various leadership positions, starting in Yemen as Athletic Director in 2001. He has also held positions of Director of Curriculum in Nigeria, Head of School in the Republic of Georgia and Principal with Le Conseil Scolaire Viamonde here in Toronto. He joined TFS in 2015 as Principal of the Senior School before stepping into the role of Executive Director of the Learning Forum in August 2020, and becoming TFS’ Head of School in July 2021.
M. Gaudet holds a master’s degree in educational administration. He speaks French and English.
Connect with Norman Gaudet: Email | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook
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Resources Mentioned
Canadian Association of School System Administrators (CASSA)
The Transcript
**Please note that all of our transcriptions come from rev.com and are 80% accurate. We’re grateful for the robots that make this possible and realize that it’s not a perfect process.
Sam Demma
Welcome back to another episode of the High Performing Educator Podcast. This is your host, Sam. Today, I’m joined by Norman Gaudet. Norman, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. Please take just a moment to introduce yourself.
Norman Gaudet
Sure. So, pleasure to be here. My name is Norman Gaudet. I am currently the head of school at Toronto French School here in Toronto. And I’ve been at this school for going on my 10th year. I’ve been an educational leader for about 20 years and in education for about 30.
Sam Demma
I haven’t interviewed many people who have worked in Yemen, in Nigeria, in Georgia, and now in Canada. Why has your educational journey taken you to so many different places? Tell me more about that.
Norman Gaudet
Basically, curiosity. So, I grew up in small-town Saskatchewan here in Canada, and it became clear to me very quickly that the world is a lot bigger than the little farm that I was growing up on. I just started to get curious to know what was out there. But I didn’t really understand even that that was going to be possible until I became a teacher. I was working in Saskatchewan, and a VP showed up at my school—vice principal—and he had just come back from working in Saudi Arabia, and my mind was blown. I was like, “How can a Saskatchewan boy end up in Saudi Arabia?”
Norman Gaudet
He told me about the pathways to take to go into education abroad. I jumped in my car, drove 23 straight hours to a job fair in the States, and found myself in Yemen one year later. From Yemen, the world just opened up. I had this amazing experience in Yemen. I was there as athletic director. The principal that I was working under, the head of school, ran schools all over the world and asked me right away, “I think you’d make a really good head of school.” So he talked to me about the Republic of Georgia and said, “You know, it’s a small school, great place to start.” And I immediately said yes. That was the beginning of my career in administration and leadership.
Norman Gaudet
Then, just after that, I really wanted to explore different places—places that weren’t Saskatchewan—which is why I went to Nigeria. And from there, I have children, and they were being introduced as the “little Canadians” everywhere we went and didn’t really understand what it meant to be Canadian. So I said, “Okay, let’s go back and explore Canada.” But I said, “Let’s explore exciting Canada. Let’s go to Toronto.” So that’s what we did. Ended up in Toronto.
Norman Gaudet
That was probably about 20 years ago, and I’m still here.
Sam Demma
23 hours straight driving. You have to be pretty driven to make that kind of a drive. What was it about that situation, that time in your life, that drove you to do that, and what drives you now? What is the “why” behind the work that you’re doing?
Norman Gaudet
That’s a great question. So I was teaching history and felt like I was not really understanding what I was teaching if I wasn’t in the places that I was teaching about. I was following the same path that he told me. He said, “You have to go to this job fair.” I discovered later there are job fairs all over the world, including Canada. I followed exactly what he said because I wanted to make sure it worked. That has been my mantra probably my whole life: figure out what works, what path you need to get to what you want to do. And don’t give up; just keep doing it. It might be hard—let me tell you, 23 hours, I was tired, stopped for a bit to just close my eyes, but I just did it because I knew that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t go where I wanted to go. And so I had to do it. When I came back home and told my wife at the time, “We’re going to Yemen,” she just looked at me, and she said, “No, we’re going to Yemen because it is a place steeped in history where I can learn so much about and become a better teacher.” And let me tell you, there are no regrets. We went there; my children were one and three at the time, and absolutely no regrets. It was the beginning of a very long and fruitful career in education that taught me about the power of community, what education can be, and how kids all over the world are just kids. They’re amazing. They all want the same kind of thing out of a school: they want to be taken care of, they want to be loved, and they want to learn. And that’s what I was able to bring to all the different schools that I’ve been at.
Sam Demma
You gave me a flashback when you said you went home and you told your wife at the time, “We’re going to Yemen,” because I don’t have a wife yet, but I six months ago walked upstairs into my family room and said, “Mom, Dad, I’m going to Kenya.” And they were like, “What?”
Norman Gaudet
Why Kenya?
Sam Demma
I had this curiosity in my heart that was pulling me to go. We spent six weeks over there in the summertime visiting schools. And like you mentioned, it blew my mind to see the same challenges that a lot of students are facing here were similarly experienced by students over there. And I think when we lead with genuine curiosity, we realize that we have way more in common with other communities and people than we do different, and we start to get a glimpse of the humanity in other groups of people. It’s really cool to hear about your international journeys. Figuring out what works, following the path, I think is such important advice, especially for educators. I’m curious: when it comes to educational leadership in your building, you’re leading 300 staff and lots of students. How do you effectively manage other people and lead a school?
Norman Gaudet
Well, that’s a question so many leaders ask themselves. I believe in a few things. I believe that if you love where you are, people will sense that. People will begin to believe in what you’re saying. But then you have to roll up your sleeves and show them that you’re ready to put in the work if you’re asking them to do the same thing.
Norman Gaudet
And then I really believe that if you dig down deep, everybody has a purpose. Everybody has a reason why they’re there. Sometimes they need to be reminded; sometimes you need to tweak and find the perfect spot. But if they’re in a school, it’s because they love kids. Somewhere along the line, they realized that they could make a difference and wanted to work in an environment where that can happen.
Norman Gaudet
If you can find that common purpose, it allows you to lead and have people want to follow. You know, there’s an old saying that as a leader, you don’t necessarily want people to follow you. What you want to be able to do is create other leaders. If you can find their purpose and help them see that they can be as impactful as you are, your job is so much easier because you’ve got a whole bunch of great leaders. In my own life, whether it’s athletic coaches, teachers who’ve made a significant impact, or administrators in my high school that I really looked up to and had close relationships with, what are some of the things you think leaders who have made a big impact in your life when you were growing up or who’ve mentored you have done that made a really big difference for you?
Norman Gaudet
So, a lot of these are going to sound like clichés, but they’re so real. It’s about that feeling you get when somebody believes in you, especially if it’s in something you never thought about before. I remember a principal I worked with when I was a teacher in Saskatchewan. I was doing the best job I could, but I never thought of being a leader. I never thought of going further than the classroom. She brought me into her office one day and said, “You know, what you do, you can have an impact on all the kids in the school, not just the 27 kids you’re working with. Have you ever thought about that?” I replied, “Well, I don’t understand. How would I have that impact?” She said, “Watch me.” She was new, but she saw so much potential in me. I had never seen that in myself before. So, I started watching what she was doing, and I thought, wow, she does have an impact. If I can do that, that would be a dream. From that day forward, I started doing everything I could to gain more experience and leadership opportunities because she believed in me when I didn’t even think that was something that could happen.
Norman Gaudet
And I see this all the time with kids. They may feel like they’re bad at math for five years in a row, and then they have one math teacher who tells them, “You know what? You can do this. I actually see something in you; there’s a spark there.” Their whole world changes because somebody believes in them. That’s so powerful. I remind everyone I work with that we have so much impact on kids and the people around us. We need to be really mindful and intentional when we say anything at all, because as much as we can be powerful for the good, we can unfortunately be powerful for the bad. So being intentional when we’re speaking and passing messages should be top of mind for anyone working with kids.
Sam Demma
I talk about it all the time: every human being has a giant invisible backpack strapped to their shoulders filled with stories, beliefs, challenges, and struggles—all of which we have no insight into because we can’t see each other’s backpacks. Every action we take or every word we use either adds weight to someone’s backpack, or if it comes from a place of love, compassion, kindness, and genuine curiosity, it hopefully removes something and helps them live a bit of a lighter life. In French schools, we say, Vide le sac à dos. I have one regret in my backpack, and it’s that growing up, I didn’t embrace the French language as much as I wish I had. As a proud Canadian, I wish I had taken that more seriously. Can you speak a little bit to the importance of the French community and the French language and how valuable a skill that is?
Norman Gaudet
Oh my gosh, I tell people all the time that it’s a superpower. You’re not just learning a language. Many teens find that a language that isn’t their primary language of emotion, which is typically English, isn’t as cool, so they begin to lose interest. I have a short motivational speech I share with them about the superpower they’ve gained without even having to work for it because they were placed in an environment where they absorbed a language. They didn’t even have to work at it; their parents made this decision for them. Now they’re bilingual. I encourage them to go home and thank their parents because they’re the reason they have this superpower. They may not realize its power at 15, but they will when they leave school. In a school like ours, they’re surrounded by bilingual kids and may not realize that the rest of Toronto isn’t as bilingual. When they go into the workplace—now the world is their workplace—they can end up anywhere and find themselves at a huge advantage because they’re fluent in multiple languages. Thankfully, our students are fluent in English, they speak French fluently, and we have a third language as a mandatory course, so they might be taking Mandarin, Spanish, or German. Many of our students even speak a fourth language, so they’re polyglots. That is rare, powerful, and special. It positions them with advantages in every aspect of their lives.
Sam Demma
You’re absolutely right. Language opens doors, career opportunities, and even pure enjoyment—being able to speak to someone in their language unlocks parts of the world you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. When I was in Kenya, I didn’t speak Kikuyu, one of the 42 tribal languages there. But I was so interested that I kept asking our local connection, Kamata, to teach me some words. In these very rural villages, where the road is dirt and uneven, and you drive no faster than five kilometers an hour, kids would be walking beside the car. They don’t often see Caucasian people, so I would roll the window down, and they would open their mouths wide in amazement. As I started learning some of the language, I would wave and say, “Kwite nĩna,” which means, “How is everyone doing?” Within five minutes, they would run away and come back with their entire family, so excited that someone took the time to figure out how to communicate in their mother tongue.
Sam Demma
There are so many words in Kikuyu that don’t have an English translation—phrases, sentiments. You actually unlock a whole other world. What if your soulmate doesn’t speak your current language? You could be opening up opportunities for so many things. As I grew up, I realized how much of an opportunity I missed, but I won’t let that stop me from reconnecting with languages as I move forward. I know it’s important to your school community, and I wanted to mention it. I also know one of the things unfolding in the world right now is the challenge around mental health and well-being. I know that at TFS, it’s a priority. What are some things you’re excited about that are shifting the conversation around mental wellness in your school?
Norman Gaudet
Mental health is absolutely a priority for us. In the past, schools—including ours—looked at mental health as a “band-aid” solution. We waited for crises to happen and then put strategies in place. But now we’re focusing on prevention, breaking down what causes a healthy mind. We all know the causes of unhealthy minds, but we want to ensure we’re putting everything in place that fosters a healthy mind. We’ve broken it down into three areas: intrapersonal health, interpersonal health, and academic health. We focus on how students feel about themselves, providing opportunities for self-acceptance, embracing their individuality, and celebrating their roles. Interpersonal health addresses social skills, building friendships, and the critical skills for happiness. For academic health, in a competitive world, kids face pressure and perfectionism. We need to ensure they feel they’re in the right place, learning at the right level, and not falling behind, which is often a source of stress. So much of it comes from how we talk to the kids. It’s the words that we’re saying to them. So we have to make sure that, again, that intentional talk, that every time we’re passing messages, we know what we’re saying. We want the kids to hear that these are the priorities we want them to build on. It’s all about healthy minds. To support that, we’ve introduced mindfulness, integrated yoga in our phys-ed programs, and even set up zen corners in every classroom so kids can take a moment, reflect, think, and process why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling. How do they manage those feelings? Do they have the strategies they need? And if they don’t, where can they find them?
Norman Gaudet
At TFS, we have a strong academic focus. We’re known to be one of the top academic schools in Canada. But I also want to make sure that while the kids are reaching their academic potential, they are mentally and emotionally healthy through it all. We start young and ensure they have the skills, strategies, and tools to manage everything that comes their way. The zen corner is one small part of that environment. Not every student will use it every day, but some students might need it right after recess or following a disagreement with friends. It gives them a moment to think, understand why they’re feeling a certain way, and decide what they want to do about it, so they can refocus and keep learning. Often, these feelings can become barriers to learning, and having these strategies helps them get back on track.
Norman Gaudet
Mental health today is top of mind for everyone, and kids are not immune to the pressures around them. Unfortunately, we’re seeing these pressures affect kids at younger ages. We have to start teaching mindfulness and self-regulation early. We’re working with our youngest students on mindfulness, yoga, and self-reflection. If they can master these skills and build them into their routines from a young age, they’ll be much better equipped to handle the emotional ups and downs that come with adolescence and beyond.
Sam Demma
I love how intentionally you’re using the phrase “causes of a healthy mind” because whenever I’m feeling challenged, burnt out, or a bit off, I always pause and ask myself, “When was a time in my life when I felt really good, on top of the world, and everything was working well?” I then think about the habits I had in place at that time that might be missing now. Sometimes, just reconnecting with those positive habits helps push me back toward that place of healthy mindfulness. It sounds like TFS has a really proactive approach, and I hope this next year continues to be a phenomenal one for both students and staff.
Sam Demma
For an educator who might be listening to this and feeling a little burnt out, or maybe it’s their first year working in a school and they just graduated, what do you think you would have needed to hear on day one that might benefit someone listening?
Norman Gaudet
I genuinely believe that every teacher needs to remember that if they’re struggling, they will never be able to be what they want to be for their students. Teachers need to look at all the different aspects of their well-being and take care of themselves. I actually shared this with our teachers on the first day of school, reassuring them that we care about them as much as we care about our students. I completely understand the connection between how teachers feel and the impact on our kids. If teachers are healthy and thriving, it’s going to positively affect our students. But if they’re feeling overwhelmed or stressed, unfortunately, that’s going to be felt by the kids as well.
Norman Gaudet
We’ve put systems in place at TFS to support our teachers, and if a school doesn’t have that, they should ask for it. Find the resources, whether it’s someone to talk to or simply taking the time they need to manage whatever they’re going through. It’s okay to ask for help. Schools need to recognize that teachers are our biggest asset. Our kids won’t flourish to their fullest potential unless our teachers are as strong as they can be. Taking care of our teachers isn’t just a priority; it’s essential.
Sam Demma
100%. People often say, “You can’t pour from an empty cup.” Thank you, Norm, for all the work you’ve done over the past few decades in education and for the work you’re continuing to do. I wish you a phenomenal year ahead. Thank you so much again for coming on the podcast. I look forward to meeting you in person at some point soon.
Norman Gaudet
Thanks, Sam. Have a great day.
Sam Demma
You as well.
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