Student Success

Shannon Mitchell – Training Specialist, Foster Care at The Family Centre in Edmonton

Shannon Mitchell – Provincial Training Coordinator for the Alberta Home Visitation Network Association
About Shannon Mitchell

Shannon Mitchell is a dedicated social worker based in Edmonton, Alberta, with a strong focus on learning and development. She began her career 20 years ago in Home Visitation, supporting families as they welcomed new babies. Most recently, she has been serving as a Training Specialist in Foster Care at The Family Centre in Edmonton. Previously, she worked as the Provincial Training Coordinator for the Alberta Home Visitation Network Association, providing training and support to professionals working with families.

Shannon is passionate about applying adult learning principles to design unique and engaging learning experiences. Her background in Home Visitation has shaped her ability to think creatively and view eLearning as an opportunity to engage differently. Whether through reflective book clubs to meet prerequisites, innovative tools, or hands-on practice opportunities, Shannon enjoys crafting trainings that support learners to learn!

Connect with Shannon Mitchell: Email | Linkedin

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

The Family Centre in Edmonton

Alberta Home Visitation Network Association

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. This is your host, Sam Demma. And today we are joined by Shannon Mitchell, who is a dedicated social worker based in Edmonton, Alberta. She’s very passionate about early childhood education, adult education, learning and development, and also streaming.

Sam Demma
She has an insane tech setup. The first time I met her, she very much impressed me with her, with her technology and skills and I’m so grateful that she’s taking the time out of her schedule to come on the show here today. Shannon, thank you so much for being

Shannon Mitchell
here. Oh, thank you for having me. It’s really exciting. My first podcast, Sam. This is the first one? Yeah. The first of many. Well, let’s hope. We’ll put my LinkedIn and people can can tag me if they want to talk to me more, right? Absolutely.

Sam Demma
Uh tell me more about your passions for both childhood education and also adult education. Where do those come from?

Shannon Mitchell
So they intersect in a way that maybe people don’t always think about very much. I can’t say that I thought about it much when I was kind of in the field, you know, one-on-one doing work with families. But when you look at early childhood, first of all, it’s really the basis for everything. So every dollar we put into early childhood gives us back about $4 into our society. So really important and really fun work. And I did a lot of work with families

Shannon Mitchell
where I was supporting them in the home to, you know, embrace their parenting style, to find things that are working for their family, to really engage them in being mindful and intentional parents and really looking at what they can do to support their child’s development now, what they can do to support their family’s development, those sorts of things. What I wish I had had a better understanding of, although I didn’t do terrible, Sam, I’ll tell you, is how adult learning principles would play into that so well. And how understanding how adults learn could have really helped me support them

Shannon Mitchell
to be learning new skills as they were learning to parents. And so as I continued my career and got into working with teaching training professionals about how to, you know, work with families and things. I found the two passions just really collided in a way that I wasn’t necessarily expecting, but was logical if I kind of took a step back and did some reflection.

Sam Demma
That’s amazing. Did you know growing up that you wanted to work in development of children and adults, or is it something that you stumbled into?

Shannon Mitchell
Kind of. So I was that kid. I was a volunteer. I worked at a food bank from like from the time I volunteered at a food bank for the time I was like 12, until I was about 16. I really was, you know, I was a candy striper. I did those things. I really enjoyed helping people. I really enjoyed getting involved. And I went through a little period kind of in my late teens. I think when our children are 12, 13, 14, we should really nurture that spirit because it’s there in almost all children and they don’t always know how to help. But there’s often this thing that comes out of

Shannon Mitchell
really recognizing the world and wanting to make a difference. And I believe if we really hone in on that, if we really help them grab that and go with it, that things can go really well in the world. I think it could change the whole world if we really help children at that age really move through that. I ran into, when I was about 16, 17, some really significant hypocrisy. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it.

Shannon Mitchell
I wish I had the internet. I feel like the internet would have helped me, maybe. But I was trying to process this adult hypocrisy I was running into, and what it did is turn me off. I was going to go work for an oil company. And you know, so things evolved as I went to university and kind of started to find

Shannon Mitchell
myself again. I had a very, very good instructor in university, a very good person to help me pick my classes. So I was always choosing classes that would let me do other things. And in the end, I ended up with a social work degree. I was like, this is actually where I want to be. I do want to support people. I actually do have this love. I just, you know, didn’t know how to process what was happening, you know,

Shannon Mitchell
in a different space that I wasn’t used to. And I wasn’t used to being in an adult space at 16 either and running into those kind of challenges. So it’s definitely been an adventure to get there. Actually, it’s four majors in university, just in case anyone’s out there like trying to find themselves, it’s okay. You’ll figure it out.

Sam Demma
What were the other three?

Shannon Mitchell
So English, and then I was like, what am I going to do an English degree? So I was like, maybe I’ll be an English teacher. So it’s interesting. I actually did look at teaching for a hot second and I didn’t enjoy the class that I took,

Shannon Mitchell
which is a really ridiculous reason to change your entire major again. But I was like, oh, maybe I don’t want to teach. Like maybe this isn’t for me. I don’t, I don’t really, what I thought was I’m not really feeling these students and they would be my peers if I went to work in a school. So I went to social work and I had the

Shannon Mitchell
opportunity to take my social work in this really secluded little corner of Saskatchewan where we had an off-campus. So there was like 20 of us taking it kind of all at the same time. It was in-person instruction at that point because it was a little too early for the internet to be really good at learning, frankly. And had this really great experience. Learned more than I think a lot of people do in their degree because we had such an insular course and were able to kind of learn from each other

Shannon Mitchell
and really dig into courses in a way that I wasn’t expecting.

Sam Demma
That’s amazing. It sounds like you had a unique educational journey and it makes me think about my own. I was someone who went to school not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life and taking a major because I thought it was just the right thing to do because everybody else was doing it

Sam Demma
and then postponing it to pursue other passions and I haven’t returned yet. It’s been a little while. And I think it’s so important that everyone remembers that all paths are different and every journey is different

Sam Demma
and there’s no special timeline that we’re all existing on where we have to do something by a certain age or a certain time, or we are quote unquote behind. Absolutely. I loved what you said about, before we started this call, that everyone as an adult, maybe even as a young person,

Sam Demma
should get a semester of time where they’re just tasked with personal development and exploration. Tell me a little bit about where that thought or idea came from.

Shannon Mitchell
So I’m currently between things. I’m looking for employment and thinking about my next steps. And as part of that process, I’ve been filling my time with things like my library programming and LinkedIn opportunities and Nonprofit Hive, anyone who knows who that is,

Shannon Mitchell
it’s amazing, going to free seminars, downloading trials of software and teaching myself how to do the rest of the adult learning online that I haven’t had the opportunity to in my employment yet. Like, really enjoying myself. If I didn’t have to worry about my next step right now, I’d be in my renaissance, right? And so, yeah, my thought was every five years we should all have this opportunity to like take a semester, four months, and just do personal development and then hop back into employment seamlessly, get paid, not have to worry about that paycheck.

Shannon Mitchell
I think that there’s a lot of… When we’re in that grind and we’re in that work, it’s hard to make time for those things that you always want to get to. And so I’m finding I don’t have enough time still, but I’m kind of doing the things that I wish I would have more time for. And then maybe it will set me up to do more of that when I actually get back to working full-time again.

Sam Demma
There’s a lot of educators listening to this that are burnt out and stressed and anxious and pouring in so much to students and teachers and everyone in their buildings. That thought is probably so juicy for them. Oh my goodness, if I could just get a semester

Sam Demma
to take a break and explore some curiosities, it would probably excite them. For someone who hasn’t explored their curiosities in a long time, they probably wouldn’t even know where to start or like what to do with that space. What are a few of the things you’ve been exploring

Sam Demma
that have surprised you or you’ve become super interested in and can recommend

Shannon Mitchell
somebody else check them out as well. So a couple of things for me if you live anywhere near a bigger city check out your library because I know my library will allow people from the neighboring communities to access it as well and it’s no longer just books I’ve learned to use a sewing machine a laser engraver a whole studio lab space I don’t know what I’m going to do with a studio lab space, but they got one. And so I learned how to use it, you know, all sorts of things that I just wouldn’t imagine.

Shannon Mitchell
And I’m like, well, if they offer it, I’m going to take it. And just they have the equipment, I can go borrow it once I’m certified. So I did that. The other thing is, I wasn’t so sure about exploring the self-directed learning aspect. there’s a lot of learning that happens best through interpersonal communication. But exploring the self-directed learning, the kind of technology side of our field, has actually been really interesting and I can see how the two can support each other so well.

Shannon Mitchell
There’s so many times, and I mean, having been a while since you’ve been a student, Sam, but there’s so many times when you’re kind of learning the same thing over and over again to make sure everyone’s got it, to make sure everyone’s got the same base. It’s basic knowledge. It doesn’t require a lot of synthesis right from us. That stuff on self-directed learning could take care of so much. I can remember like, you and I’ve talked about our generation gap, right? So we’re talking early 90s when I was in high school. And I can remember learning the metric system like six

Shannon Mitchell
times in six different courses through high school. High school is only three years in Saskatchewan. I was like so done with it. But every class had to make sure you had the base. So if I could have just gone on a self-directed learning, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, show I knew it, and then we could move on, life would have been so much easier, right?

Shannon Mitchell
So I think about that sometimes, how those two things are gonna work hand in hand. And I didn’t expect to find that. If you’d asked me what I thought about self-directed learning in June of this year, I would have been like, eh, I’m not sure it’s a good idea.

Shannon Mitchell
And now I can definitely see how the two can support one another and make learning more effective. And really, younger people don’t always want this interaction in particular. You know, it’s a little trickier. Those who grew up in the pandemic, even trickier yet, I think. So if we can kind of interacting with the machine kind of way, I think that we can really find something that will support adult learning principles and support people where they want to learn right now.

Sam Demma
When you think about your time doing work in learning and development, what aspects of it bring you the most joy and fulfillment?

Shannon Mitchell
I really like, I see it as a bit of a puzzle. So I am I also like telling stories and I think storytelling is actually amazing. So it’s like a win win. But I think that, you know, when I set out a course and I’m looking at what people are trying to learn, you start breaking it up into half hour chunks. They can’t listen to me from, you know, for a long period of time. What are we doing in this half hour to change things up? What are we doing to change their brain? What’s going to ground the learning here? What can we bring them in? What will will they maybe be willing to contribute?

Shannon Mitchell
I loved it every training. I did Ages and Stages questionnaire training probably, let’s say, 30 times in six years. And it was different every time because of who was in the space. And that was a training that had a lot of content. So there wasn’t a lot of room for reflection, not a lot of room for… And still every single one of them was different.

Shannon Mitchell
And I learned something every time I did it. So that was really exciting to me. I really like that process of figuring out. I like talking to people, too. My favorite training was actually virtual online trainings.

Shannon Mitchell
So the in-person was good, but I really enjoyed people from all over the province together, sometimes all over the country, connecting differently and using some of the tools that I found. I got really excited about some of the tools that can engage interaction.

Shannon Mitchell
And so I really found it more enjoyable than I ever imagined, actually. But Sam, I want to go back to those burned out people you talked about. Can I? Please. I will tell you, I think I’ve heard you ask people, and I might be preempting a question, but I think I’ve heard you ask people, like, tell me about your favourite teacher, your favourite educator. I’ve had so many and know that there’s someone out there right

Shannon Mitchell
now who is feeling what you’re doing as a teacher and it is impacting their lives. I grew up in the 70s, 80s, 90s. I was born in the late 70s and I was a girl who was talkative and curious and that didn’t always go over well in public. People didn’t always love a little girl who had a lot to say. The world was changing, but my teachers, almost all of them, adored it and nurtured it. And I could tell you, you know, my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Paddock, and I’m 47 years old, I can tell you about Mrs. Heffernan, who made room for me to learn in my own way. I can tell you about, you know, oh, I’ve lost her name. My grade four teacher, who’s

Shannon Mitchell
now an author, I even have her book and I’ve just completely lost her, Betty Dorian, who was like, oh, Shani, you’ve kind of missed some of this along the way. We had some split classes and stuff. Would you like some extra work to learn this grammar stuff? And I’m like, I’m here for it. And she’s like, I gotcha. Right. So people who really supported me my entire way, so if you’re kind of feeling burned out, look for that child because they’re there. Sometimes they’re the quiet one who’s like absorbed and sometimes they’re like

Shannon Mitchell
me and they got things to say and sometimes they challenge you and if I really like you, I will challenge you. So that’s something, you know, even in high school was a thing. And so just recognizing that there’s a child out there who needs what you’re doing right now and that doesn’t mean you can’t take a break, but it’s not what you’re doing now is not for naught.

Sam Demma
I appreciate you bringing that up, especially around this time of year. I think there’s a lot of people that have been really pushing hard and they’re reaching for the break and hoping that that break gives them what they need to show up again in the new year with full recharged batteries for others. How do you make sure you stay full so that when you do show up in spaces where you need to contribute to others, you have the capacity to do so.

Shannon Mitchell
I think it’s important to think about what parts of your job do feed you. Yeah. And what parts do take your energy. So I love the online virtual training, but actually days of an on-end were draining. I had to have a variety. So thinking about where in your work you can put those places in. And what about this thing do you really enjoy? If you’re teaching littles,

Shannon Mitchell
where can you put some breaks in that will support you and the children, right? So if you’re teaching older children, where can you let them explore themselves or express their opinions? You know, I had a teacher in high school who rearranged our desks. I used to sit in the back and our classroom ended up with the back seats weren’t there anymore. There was an extra row now. And I got there not in time to like pick the back desk. So I just sat down where my desk

Shannon Mitchell
used to be on the floor. And the teacher just taught the class as though nothing happened. And by about the fourth day, I’m sitting on the floor and I’m going, Oh, God, how am I going to get out of this? Like, how am I going to get out of this Sam? And he goes, Shannon, there’s a quiz today, get your desk. And I was so relieved to get my desk. Right? So recognizing what you need to take on and what you don’t. I mean, again, I still remember this. At the time, I can very distinctly remember thinking, now I’ve got myself into this and I don’t want to just go take a desk. But by the

Shannon Mitchell
time he kind of was like, it’s time, Shannon. I was like, yeah, yeah, it’s time. So recognizing what you need to take on and what you don’t, you know, having some faith in our young people and letting them control some of their learning. Oh, I have so much to say.

Shannon Mitchell
I absolutely love this story.

Sam Demma
I appreciate you sharing it. I think we choose our battles sometimes based on our own perceived needs or desires versus what might be best for us. And I’ve done it so many times in my own life. And yeah, I appreciate you.

Sam Demma
And what’s normal, right?

Shannon Mitchell
Like this perception of what we’re supposed to be doing and recognizing that, you know, you and I are half a country apart right now in two different cities, I think. I don’t know if you’re home, but I’m in Edmonton and to get down east, I mean, there are literally an infinite number of ways to get there. Even leaving my neighborhood, how many ways are there to leave? And is any way better than another, right?

Shannon Mitchell
And so recognizing that even if we’re going the same place, every path we take is valid and it might teach us something different. This time of year, I might see new Christmas lights even if I take the long way to my neighborhood. So is that the most effective way to get there?

Shannon Mitchell
No, but does it do something different for me than yesterday’s route did? Yes. And so really recognizing that it’s okay to let kids be on their own journey. I know you have like things you have to do. I’ve done training where I had

Shannon Mitchell
to, people have to be able to do this tool at the end. But really recognizing that, you know, if we get where we’re going, we get where we’re going.

Sam Demma
Yeah, I love it. Where do you want to go in the next few years? Do you have an idea of a, I know you’re in this phase of exploration, but maybe there’s someone listening to this who might be able to connect the dot for you.

Shannon Mitchell
Yeah, I am really become more and more passionate about the learning development area. And so I will be honest, there’s not a lot of jobs in my field as far as like, connecting early childhood and adult learning. If someone has one of those, I’d be happy to take it. I’m really looking at how to grow my skills and learning development and take a position in a job that will let me kind of use what I’m already good at. I’m an excellent facilitator. I’m excellent at developing programs. I need more practice on the self-directed learning side of development and those sorts of things.

Shannon Mitchell
And I need both of those things. I need to be able to use my skills and be learning to really thrive in a job. So if someone wants, you know, a trainer in a field I’m not familiar with, that gives me the opportunity to learn a whole bunch of new things too, which is fantastic. So I’m pretty open to a lot of different things right now. I’m really thinking about what my skills are, because I think I’m going to just get a little sociopolitical on you, Sam, but especially as women, we’re taught not to brag a lot and not to

Shannon Mitchell
own our strength and not to own our skills. And you’ll hear us say things like, oh, I just a lot more. Even when you read the research, women and actually people of colour and other people who experience marginalization are less likely to apply for jobs that they’re not like 95 percent

Shannon Mitchell
qualified for already. And so I’ve decided to be bold and apply for jobs that maybe I don’t think will call me back, but maybe they will. And so but it’s having to really be kind to myself too, because that means I’m putting out a lot of resumes

Shannon Mitchell
that aren’t getting callbacks. But I’m like, you know, 30% of these, I’m actually probably not expecting callback. And I need to teach myself to be okay with that. Yeah, so that’s where I’m at right now.

Sam Demma
And I’m so excited to hear about where it ends up. I’m sure whoever brings you onto their team is gonna absolutely love having you and be better off because of it. And if there is someone listening right now, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Shannon, and she was lovely to work with. And we enjoyed, I enjoyed all of our calls,

Sam Demma
and it was seamless. And I am not getting paid if she gets a job, just so anyone recognizes this is not a paid promotion, nor is it the reason that we set this up. We set it up well before she was in a new job search. She’s just a lovely human being that would add so much value to a team. And I hope that whoever’s listening recognizes that and opens some doors for you. In closing, Shannon, is there any last like big ideas or thoughts on your mind that you wanna share with the educators that are tuning in?

Shannon Mitchell
Yes, and I think this applies to your work too, Sam. And I did mention to this to you once in a call, but I think I can kind of tie together the educators we’ve been talking about, my experience, but also what you do. And I always think about when we talk about the little things that happen in life. Here you are, you do like three of these a week maybe. For me, it’s exciting, right? And so when you think about everything we do, if we think about it like pages in a book, you know, one page, rip, it’s gone.

Shannon Mitchell
It’s easy to rip that page. But there’s whole competitions about ripping a phonebook because it’s so hard to do. So when you think about everything that you’re doing in a positive way is really building. And honestly, we don’t need perfection in our caregivers. We don’t need perfection in our educators. Children are born to be resilient and they’re born to have people who are caring for them make mistakes and all those things. But every positive thing we do adds another page to that notebook. And as we’re going through life, we’ve got this big book of amazing things that are supporting us that can be really hard to break.

Shannon Mitchell
And so I think like you’re contributing right now another page to my book. You brought me in here and you’re like, I believe in you, Shannon, and I think that you have something to say. I think all of these educators who are watching are adding those pages to this children’s notebooks every day, and they’re not even realizing that they’re probably doing it. And so, and it doesn’t take much recognizing strengths, you know, looking for the positive

Shannon Mitchell
first, even we got to correct kids. But it doesn’t mean we can’t look for the positive first, right? All those kind of things that really build up children that will have these giant notebooks, which is the one thing they should keep in their backpack, Sam, for the whole life, right? I love it.

Sam Demma
So, so true. And within each notebook, there’s memories of people’s names on it, you know, attached to them. And so just to keep that in mind, like every action we take has an impact

Sam Demma
not only on the positive, but also it could be on the negative. And so let’s be cautious about the words we use and the actions we take. And yeah, I think about folks who have taught me what to do and taught me not what not to do.

Sam Demma
And both are equally as valuable, but some way heavier than others. If someone’s listening to this and they want to have a conversation with you, Shannon, or reach out, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Shannon Mitchell
I would say, I think you’re going to put things in the notes, right? So Linkedin, and there is my email that you’re perfectly welcome to engage with as well. Yeah, I’m learning to use LinkedIn and kind of enjoying the kind of more focused social media aspect of it, but certainly email is a good place to find me too.

Sam Demma
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, keep exploring during this phase of your life. And I’m so grateful for your thoughts, your ideas and your presence. your ideas and your presence.

Shannon Mitchell
Thank you, Sam.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Shannon Mitchell

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

February 20, 2025 by Social Worker Student Success 0

Betty Norton, M. Ed. – Chief Academic Officer at Xceed Preparatory Academy Virtual School

Betty Norton, M. Ed. – Chief Academic Officer at Xceed Preparatory Academy Virtual School
About Betty Norton

For almost 30 years, Betty Norton worked for Broward County Public Schools where she taught middle school students and later concentrated on special populations included Gifted and Exceptions Student Education (ESE) classrooms and Title I schools.  

Motivated to bring even more value to the students of Broward County, Ms. Norton pursued and earned a National Board Certification in 2004 and a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction in 2007, while concurrently dedicating her time to increase academic achievement in the district’s middle and high schools. She worked at the district level from 2005-2016. She worked for Core Curriculum as a curriculum developer and then in 2009 transferred to the dept of Accountability. In both cases, she was assigned to low-performing schools (D-F schools) and led a team of district support to evaluate, design, and implement school improvement plans and met with great success. Norton also provided training for faculty and administration. 

Keen to learn more about virtual and remote education, Ms. Norton also spent seven-and-a-half years working for both Broward Virtual School and Florida Virtual School before embarking on her career at Xceed Preparatory Academy Virtual School, where she served as Head of Schools for Coral Springs. When Xceed Preparatory Academy Virtual School opened in 2020, Norton was tapped to lead the global virtual campus and since then, has become a go-to expert in online, remote and virtual education, having been featured in Thrive Global and numerous family and lifestyle blogs.  

Ms. Norton earned a Bachelor of Science in Secondary English Education from the University of Central Florida and a Master of Science from Capella University. 

Connect with Betty Norton: Email | Linkedin

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

Broward County Public Schools
Broward Virtual School
Florida Virtual School
Xceed Preparatory Academy Virtual School

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 Demma. Today we have a very special guest on the show. Betty Norton is a veteran in education, almost 30 years. She is currently sitting in her office in beautiful Florida where it is sunny outside and I’m sitting in my office where it is minus five and snowing.

Sam Demma
Betty has an unwavering passion for education, personalizing the experience to individuals to meet their needs and help them excel and exceed. Betty, thank you so much for coming on the show here today. Thank you so much.

Betty Norton
It’s my pleasure.

Sam Demma
Tell me a little bit about the work that you’re doing in education today and what got you into education in the first place.

Betty Norton
Okay, well, those are two very big questions. Do we have time for both? What I do in education these days. So I actually am the chief academic officer for several private schools that we have here in South Florida.

Betty Norton
We have six physical campuses and one virtual school that we use to kind of overlay across all of our campuses. We have students all around the world who attend our virtual school. And we also have students who are visiting the state of Florida for their sports and maybe attending any one of our XSEED Prep campuses.

Betty Norton
So that’s what I do now. I do oversee them. And my focus is doing whatever we can to make those schools better, to be able to provide students with a personalized learning education that really fulfills their needs and helps them achieve their goals. And the biggest reason why I got into education

Betty Norton
is because I have a big passion for it. I know that everyone says that, but I genuinely enjoy working with young people, especially middle schoolers and high schoolers. I graduated college going into business and then very quickly switched gears and went straight into education and I’ve never looked back.

Sam Demma
You mentioned the importance of creating personalized educational experiences and journeys for students. What does that look like for your schools? Great question.

Betty Norton
So at our schools, we have, let’s say for example, our schools open from 8 to 3.30 every day. And we personalize our students’ schedules all the way down to when they will be on campus. So a traditional campus will have students coming in at 8, leaving at 3.30, bells will ring and they will switch from class to class. They only have a certain amount of time with

Betty Norton
each of their teachers and let’s say for example if you’re waiting to get to number 17 because that’s the only question you really had a problem with, it’s really difficult when everyone else kind of gets a turn and perhaps the bell rings before you even get your shot at it. So at XSEED our students have flexible schedules. Some of our students come maybe three or four times a week. They may be on campus for about five to six hours, and they get to work with their teachers individually,

Betty Norton
and they also get to work with their teachers in small group sessions. So one of the ways that we customize our curriculum for them is meeting them where they are and then being able to create a support system for any foundational skills that they may be lacking. We help remediate those throughout the day. And then while they’re working with their teachers and working in small groups,

Betty Norton
they’re accelerating and moving forward. So we have the ability to have some students who may take a little bit longer to earn their high school diploma and say they might go an extra semester. But the opposite is also true.

Betty Norton
We have plenty of students who wish to graduate early because they wanna pursue their careers or the ideas and dreams that they’ve been planning. So sometimes we have students who graduate early.

Sam Demma
And recently you opened a few more schools. Tell me a little bit about it.

Betty Norton
Yes, that was quite the endeavor. We opened three new campuses this August and they are spread out throughout South Florida. We have a new campus in Boca, one in Palm Beach Gardens and one in Fort Lauderdale. All of them were quite exciting and quite challenging

Betty Norton
to open, trying to do three things at once is always a challenge. But we are hoping to tap into those communities and again, allow those students the opportunity to get the education personalized and have those needs met. Our schools tend to be rather small. Our schools are less than 100 students at each campus. And we do that by design so that the teachers can go ahead and personalize things and work students in small groups, if not one-on-one.

Sam Demma
How do people find your schools? Has XSEED been open for a long time? Tell me a little bit more about the process of a family getting their kid involved in one of your campuses.

Betty Norton
Yes, so we opened our doors back in September of 2017. And honestly, the fastest way for them to find us now is typically word of mouth. We have a very strong community build where our families will share with their friends and let them know what the experience has been for their child and so they’ll come out and visit our campuses. But otherwise we do

Betty Norton
what everybody else seems to do. We participate in conversations, we go to conferences, we have our website and Google and so forth. So we do have an active Instagram page and we get a lot of our families through our social and through word of mouth

Sam Demma
When you think of the students you serve at exceed across all campuses How do you measure the success of a student is it? I guess it must be based on their own goals and dreams and if you if you were able to help them move closer to those, but are there any students that stick out in your mind when you think of the impact that XSEED has had on a student’s journey?

Betty Norton
Yes, so you’re right. We do have a different, different ways of measuring, but quite honestly the first and foremost way that I measure student success is based on how happy they are. Many of our students are coming to us because they either feel like they’ve been left behind at a traditional school, whether it be private or public. Larger schools have a difficult time, and no fault to them.

Betty Norton
I used to work public school for about 20 years, so I understand the needs of the classroom teacher. But sometimes you just need to have a little bit of extra time every day to help you do what you need to do. So some of our students really come to us because they want that flexibility in their day,

Betty Norton
they want a little bit of a later start, and they want more of that one-on-one experience so that we can help them with those foundational skills. So honestly, seeing students go from being a little sad or depressed or feeling like they couldn’t achieve things or just even basic things like,

Betty Norton
miss, I’m not good at this math, I’d like to skip it or move on to something else. And then going in, let’s say six to seven weeks after they start with us and see them participating, not only just joining, but participating in a group session and getting up to the board and running through the math and showing you that they know what they’re doing is kind of an amazing task. I think one of the biggest memories that I have with XSEED that really made me proud of what we do and what our team has been successfully doing for the last few years, especially.

Betty Norton
I’ve been to probably 50 or 60 National Honor Society inductions. Between all the schools that I’ve ever worked in and working at the district level, you tend to be invited to things like that. And it’s always a very nice affair and everyone’s quite proud of their child. But at Exceed,

Betty Norton
since so many of those students were already struggling at their previous schools, I’d never seen so many parents just kind of move to tears with sharing so many stories of how their child, if they stayed at their school, they would have never been part of National Honor Society because they just weren’t getting the time and attention that they needed to be successful. So to see something that became so normal for me and then run into so many families that were just crying

Betty Norton
and brought every relative, the biggest event just to celebrate their child’s success really was a huge moment for me. It made me feel like we really were heading in the right direction and providing this level of education for kids.

Sam Demma
It’s so cool to hear about the impact the programs are creating in the lives of families and their children. I know that the reason many educators, heart-centered individuals, get into education is because they want to make a difference. Sometimes you don’t hear about it for a really long time, and more often than not, might not even realize that you are making

Sam Demma
a serious contribution to the life of a young person and their family. To attend an event like that and hear the stories must be such a gift. It sounds like you’ve spent years in public education, you’ve now spent multiple years in private education.

Sam Demma
You’ve also spent years teaching and leading virtual education. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to create a great experience virtually for students because school boards, especially in the pandemic hit, really struggled to maintain engagement and provide a good experience virtually. But I think it’s a beautiful opportunity to connect students from all over the globe with virtual experiences.

Sam Demma
And I know you’ve been doing it very well. No, thank you. And I mean, Sam, I’ll have to say, just this experience that you and I are currently having,

Betty Norton
that you’re in Canada and I’m in Florida, and we’re able to have this conversation, and I feel like we’re in the same room just chatting with each other. So the virtual education, I think, that’s probably the biggest piece right there.

Betty Norton
If you can help the student feel like they are live and in person and they’re engaging, regardless of where they’re sitting, I think you’ve really, you’ve kind of like overcome your first hurdle, if you will, in the virtual world. The other is over communication. I think that when you have a physical environment, people get a lot of their

Betty Norton
physical cues, you know, they look at each other, they can see how someone is feeling and so on, but in the virtual world, it’s kind of radio silent until you tap into them. So it’s really important to have different engagement opportunities for our students. We have social hours for them. We have activities that we sometimes run. We have virtual parties. We have all kinds of things that help them still be a part

Betty Norton
of our virtual community. They can even volunteer online and participate in donations if they wanted to donate for Toys to Tots or what have you through that virtual platform. So I think the key there in order for the students to feel really engaged is to have those connections

Betty Norton
and have those opportunities for the students to be a part of something, whether they can physically be there or not, they feel connected to everyone else in the group.

Sam Demma
Throughout your educational career, which mentors have you had or resources that have been really instrumental in your personal and professional development? And if so, what did you learn from those things or those individuals?

Betty Norton
Yes, that’s a really good question. So I’m gonna have to say my very first resource is the library. Ever since I was in elementary school, any time I wanted to know a little bit more about something rather than, and maybe this is probably because I did go to public and private school when I was younger, but going to your teacher and asking 20 questions wasn’t always ideal.

Betty Norton
So being able to go to the library and check out books and talk to the librarian and learn as much as I could about a particular topic really helped me stay curious and really helped me figure out how to tap into things and be a self-advocate and self-reliant. I think those skills really have transferred into my academic career and my professional career. But if I were to talk about any one mentor that I think really helped change things and

Betty Norton
helped mold me is Dr. Janet Allen. She was my college professor, and I kind of used to call her my college mom. So she’s the person who guided me through the entire process, helped me land my first job in education, and really saw that I had a passion for working with students, especially underprivileged students,

Betty Norton
who may have been attending Title I schools or lived in difficult environments. And me growing up in Newark, New Jersey also kind of gave me that opportunity to feel like, yes, I know what it’s like to be in a tough neighborhood and go to school.

Betty Norton
So she really understood what I wanted and saw that talent in me and made sure that I was in every rough school I could possibly work in so that I can make the greatest impact. And I really appreciate her for that because if it wasn’t for her, I don’t know that I would have taken advantage of those opportunities myself.

Sam Demma
Does she know how much of a difference she’s made in your journey in life?

Betty Norton
I hope so. I ran into her probably about seven years ago. She was presenting at a conference and I just walked up to her and said, hey, do you remember me? And she said, yes.

Betty Norton
And I said, I just wanted to give you a big hug and say, these are all the things I’ve been able to accomplish because you put me, or helped put me on the right path. And we both cried a little bit over that and reminisced about the good old days.

Betty Norton
But so I think to a certain extent she knows. Does she know? The full extent of it I think as teachers we never really know the power that we have over someone or how far our reach is, even when we run into them, really. They share their successes, and we say that’s fascinating. But to have that inside of you and every time you think about that person,

Betty Norton
you can get warm fuzzies and feel like they were your greatest cheerleader and supporter. I don’t know that we ever know how great that impact is.

Sam Demma
I think it’s an important reminder that we don’t know, and it’s equally as important a reminder to reach out to those individuals and tell them. I have a teacher who in grade 12 totally changed my life and trajectory, and fortunately he lives close to home,

Sam Demma
and we’ve stayed in touch over email, and once a year I try to eat a lunch with him and his wife on their porch and their dog. And every time I go, I get emotional. And I tell him and his wife how thankful and grateful I am for their presence in my life growing up.

Sam Demma
And I just think that the world needs more of those moments. And if you still have contact with Dr. Janet, it would be a beautiful reason to reach out and let her know. And if you’re an educator listening to this and you haven’t heard from a student or a colleague about the impact you’ve created on their life, just because you haven’t heard doesn’t mean you weren’t instrumental in that person’s personal and professional development. So please keep showing up and keep going and start the cycle. If there’s someone who had an impact on you

Sam Demma
and you’re listening to this, reach out to them. Use this as a reason to do so. I’m curious, Betty, you seem like someone who is extremely driven and dedicated to supporting young people and their families and advancing them in their education and their personal dreams and goals. How do you fill your own cup when you’re not at work to ensure that when you do show up,

Sam Demma
you’re giving the best of yourself that you possibly can? Well, I think the most important thing is to strike a balance between what you do for

Betty Norton
yourself and what you do for others. And a balance doesn’t necessarily mean 50 50, right? Today, it might be 100% exceed and 0% Betty, but tomorrow, it might be 90% Betty and 10% exceed, right? It’s knowing that balance, knowing what the priority is of the day and where you’re going to make the most impact. When you first start off, especially doing something

Betty Norton
at this scale, you feel like you have to be there for every single person, and you want to be a great leader, you want to be able to talk to them and say, I have an open-door policy, reach out to me, talk to me. But if you allow that, you could easily have 65 to 70 people reaching out to you on a daily basis,

Betty Norton
trying to troubleshoot things. So I think the biggest thing that I try to do, especially with our heads of schools and our leadership team is delegates, right? I want them to be able to provide and support our teachers by becoming experts in different areas. So even though I oversee everything,

Betty Norton
I do have them helping and balancing the load. And I try to take off as much as I can off their plates so that they can spend their time working on the job itself, working with the families and the students. And I take care of the business side of things or managing any issues that we may have, our curriculum, our facilities,

Betty Norton
and so forth. But I think having that downtime at home, spending time with my family, I have a daughter, a son, and a beautiful husband who are incredibly supportive of me, who understand that sometimes I have to work on a Sunday at 6 in the morning, and understand that, you know, I make up for it in other ways. We have family time, we always have dinner together, I do have a few things that are non-negotiables, if

Betty Norton
you will. I think those are important to have that set of standards in your work life, but also have some boundaries in your personal life.

Sam Demma
Saying no is so difficult in my own personal life. I know that as an educator, you’re pulled in hundreds of different directions too. How do you build that muscle to set the boundaries and stick to them when you really want to serve and support all the time

Betty Norton
You make a lot of mistakes. I’m gonna be honest with you. I mean, it’s not it’s most certainly not a perfected craft I think it’s always a work in progress and I think it will be until forever Yeah, it really is, you know, sometimes you sit there and go jeez. I probably shouldn’t have extended myself there I really wanted to be better at this and it really only takes one or two opportunities where you feel like you could have been at 100% to make you feel like, okay, I need to really focus because being here for the students and our families is what’s most important to me. Being here to support the teachers is also incredibly important. So once you have

Betty Norton
that experience, you say, all right, I’m going to wake up every morning and get myself organized. So that’s exactly what I do before I even hop out of bed. I go through my calendar, what’s going on, what do I need to do, what do I need to fire off and delegate or ask someone to assist with so that I can clear the path and be fully present. That’s something that I’ve been focusing on,

Betty Norton
especially over the last two years, with everything that happened with COVID and social media and all the things that are going on, wanting to be present is incredibly important for me. So I do, I sit with people, I like to sit with you face-to-face.

Betty Norton
I ask for people to turn off their cell phones and let’s just have 20 minutes where you and I are engaging, we’re present, we’re here, we’re not worrying about all the things that are happening around us. And let’s focus on the items that we wanna get to, to make a better tomorrow for everybody.

Betty Norton
But it is difficult.

Sam Demma
The presence piece is huge. I think about my personal relationships and when I feel most seen, heard, understood and connected to others. And it’s when we are sitting together face to face or engaging in an activity, our phones are off or not in sight.

Sam Demma
Simon Sinek, there’s a picture or a video of him sitting on stage, and he pulls out his phone and holds it in his hand and waves it around while he’s speaking, and ask the audience, did it change the way you feel about me while I’m holding my phone speaking to you right now versus when it was hidden in my pocket. And as a viewer watching this video online, I answered the question in my head like saying yes,

Sam Demma
because it made me feel like I wasn’t the most important thing, that you’re holding onto something else. Maybe there’s something you’re thinking about related to your phone or a task you have to complete rather than being present with me.

Sam Demma
And it’s something I’ve tried to carry forward in all of our relationships, whether personally or professionally. When you think about XSEED and the new year’s right around the corner, what are some of the objectives the school as a whole,

Sam Demma
across all campuses are focused on, or some of the things you’re very excited about as we move forward?

Betty Norton
Yeah, so I think I have to start that by saying that I’m already in planning mode for fall of 2025, right? So I’m looking at our curriculum, our staffing, our facilities, the resources, what do we need to do? Are we adding more classes? Are we taking away classes?

Betty Norton
What are we gonna do to help provide opportunities for our students, field trips, guest speakers, and so on. So I’m very much ingrained in fall of 2025 right now, to the point where I’ve actually put in my calendar that Christmas is a week away and I need to shop. And every single day I have a notification

Betty Norton
that says go Christmas shopping, because I’m just so living in the future right now. And we have so many great things planned. We have, you know, with all of our campuses kind of ramping up for the fall, we wanna be able to provide

Betty Norton
those unique student experiences. I’m very big on experience versus giving someone an actual gift, I’d rather you have an experience or a moment, so we’re focusing on what do we need to do to take that classroom, that day-to-day and add to it, right? How do we take this opportunity

Betty Norton
and let you have a real life experience through a guest speaker or a field trip or even just a virtual tour? Those are incredibly powerful as well. You can visit anywhere in the world on a virtual tour. And I think it’s quite fascinating

Betty Norton
to be able to do that with students. But of course, continuing our work with the rigorous curriculum, we are a college prep school, so we want to make sure that we have strong relationships with the colleges and universities, especially those that our students wish to attend. And then supporting our community, having more opportunities dedicated to volunteer work and being able to work with everyone in our, you know, surrounding cities and towns by donating our time. So those are our big focuses.

Sam Demma
It’s been such a pleasure having you on the podcast to talk about your journey through education, some of your beliefs and philosophies around education and the cool things that are happening at XSEED across all the campuses. If someone is listening to this very inspired,

Sam Demma
wants to share a note of gratitude or appreciation or ask you a question, what would be the best way for them to reach out and get in touch with you?

Betty Norton
Absolutely, I would love it. I like talking shop, so anyone who’s open to chat, I’m always up for it. But I think emailing me at bnorton@xceedprep.org would be fantastic.

Sam Demma
Awesome, Betty, thank you so much for your time and your presence. I appreciate it and I wish you all the best in 2025 and beyond.

Betty Norton
Thank you so much, Sam. It’s been really great speaking with you today. It’s been really great speaking with you today. Thank you for your time.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Betty Norton

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

February 13, 2025 by Director of Education Education Educator Entrepreneur School Administration Virtual Education 0

Andrea Michelutti – Principal at Laurelwood Public School

Andrea Michelutti – Principal at Laurelwood Public School
About Andrea Michelutti

Andrea Michelutti is an experienced administrator with the Waterloo Region District School Board, where she has served communities since 2008. Over the years, she has worked in a variety of schools, gaining extensive experience and insight into the diverse needs of students, staff, and school communities. Andrea believes her role as an administrator is to “Uplift, Uphold, and Support” every person she serves. Guided by this philosophy, she fosters an inclusive and empowering environment where individuals are encouraged to thrive. Andrea is deeply committed to leveraging the strengths of her staff, enabling them to be their best selves while delivering excellence in education and care. With a passion for student success, Andrea inspires young people to reach and exceed their hopes, dreams, and goals. Her dedication to nurturing growth, resilience, and achievement has made her a respected leader and a source of inspiration for students, colleagues, and the broader school community alike.

Connect with Andrea Michelutti: Email | Linkedin | Twitter

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

Waterloo Region District School Board
Laurelwood Public School

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 Demma, and today I am very excited. We have a special guest who is full of full of energy, Andrea McAloody from Laurelwood in Waterloo. I’m so excited to have you on the show to talk about all the amazing things going on at the school. Thank you so much for for coming on.

Andrea Michelutti
I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Sam.

Andrea Michelutti
I appreciate you coming to our school last year, and our students still talk about you. They talk about your red backpack. They talk about always being positive and thinking about what we can do better. So, thank you for this opportunity.

Sam Demma
Since I’ve been at the school, I hear there’s a 10-classroom addition that’s been built and that students are taking the initiative to make it a very hospitable experience, a new, beautiful space where every student feels welcome. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on in the school right now.

Andrea Michelutti
So we are very fortunate. We received ministry funding for a 10 classroom addition because our population keeps increasing. We’re over 700 students. And when it opened this year, we opened to fanfare. The architects really worked hard

Andrea Michelutti
so we have the consistent building, the consistent paint colors, the consistent floor. But what we noticed was that our students took a lot of pride in our building. Our students really focused on what’s on the walls, how are they seen, and what are those really great things that they can do.

Andrea Michelutti
They talked about having, you know, a class meeting and how the third environment is what is needed to make sure they feel successful.

Sam Demma
In addition to the addition on the school, tell me a little bit more about how this year has been so far.

Andrea Michelutti
This year has been absolutely incredible. We started this year with more students than we’ve ever expected, and our students have really been working on this idea of hospitality. It came from my conversations with some students in grade eight, and we focused on those opportunities

Andrea Michelutti
of what they can do every day to make others feel welcomed and accepted. So I always say to my students there’s three things that I need to do. I need to support all of our students. I need to uplift all of our students. And I need to uphold or uphold the high expectations, support all of our students, and uplift. So when we talk about uplifting, we’re talking about like greeting our students,

Andrea Michelutti
making a welcome environment. And I had a group of grade eight students come and say, we need to make sure all of our new students to Laurelwood also feel the same way.

Sam Demma
And was this a student-driven idea? Like they approached you and said, hey, we have to do this, or how did it all come about?

Andrea Michelutti
So when I first came to the school, I went to visit every class and I talked about uplift, uphold, support. And when I first arrived, there’d be days where I’d walk the halls. I was new, where students wouldn’t say hello to me. And I said, I expect you to say good morning to say hello. And at first I thought, oh, this is going to be a little silly. Nobody’s going to buy in. And they bought in. And so we’ve been doing that for about a year and a half. And this September,

Andrea Michelutti
our students came to me, a group of boys came and said, we need to make sure our new grade sevens and our new students also understand the importance of greeting each other. I also had some form where students come back and say they’re at new schools now and they don’t feel the same way. And they’ve also approached their teachers and principals to say, how come you don’t greet us at the door? What can you do different? So it’s that slow momentum. But listening to student voice, especially our grade eight students,

Andrea Michelutti
wanting that environment shows that we’re on the right track.

Sam Demma
It sounds like you’ve built quite the culture and community at the school. How do you build this culture of belonging in a school building?

Andrea Michelutti
That’s one of those tricky pieces. So a few schools back, we really focused on that idea of how do all students feel welcome? And so what we did at one of my staff meetings was I had all my teachers go around and take pictures of what the environment looked like

Andrea Michelutti
and how it created a welcoming environment. And so we put a slide show together, I thought it was great. But then we went to the next level and we had all of our students go around and do the same activity to see the adults in the building

Andrea Michelutti
seeing the same things the students are seeing in the building. And we realized there was some things that were the same, but the students really focused on relationships with teachers. They wanted to take pictures of adults

Andrea Michelutti
that they felt that they were safe with and that they can care that that felt cared about And that was most interesting So knowing that I did stumble with my few decisions before because we weren’t too sure where we were going When I came to the school, I really focused on that student voice and those relationships Why I think we’ve been very successful is because we’re talking openly about it and I’ll take student feedback, even the feedback that’s really hard, I listen to them and see what I can do to improve.

Sam Demma
One of the other programs I’ve heard the school has put a major focus on improving is with special education and the mental health of students. Can you tell me a little bit about that this year also?

Andrea Michelutti
So, being a former special education teacher and a former student where I was in a special education program. I know that many of our students always felt a little awkward because learning was hard for them. They had to learn differently. So with my special education team,

Andrea Michelutti
we really talked about what we can do differently to really target our students in kindergarten, grade one, and grade two to fill in those gaps. And we noticed that our students were feeling more successful.

Andrea Michelutti
We focused on their assets and how can they use their assets to improve their areas where they needed a little more improvement. So I’m thinking about a student in the primary grades. Reading is really difficult for her. And what we really focused on was her ability

Andrea Michelutti
to be an amazing dancer and amazing presenter. So we talked about those really strong strengths, and then we moved it into her reading, and she’s already made huge improvements in reading where now she comes to school every day. So by focusing on making students feel good

Andrea Michelutti
about themselves, really connecting on their strengths, one of the side effects, or one of the outcomes, is better attendance at school. We also changed our educational assisted model from being somebody who just jumps in to support kids, to being joy builders.

Andrea Michelutti
So when EAs come in, they are the ones who are there to bring joy to the classroom. So before, some kids would be like, oh, there’s an EA in the classroom. I hope they don’t take me to work with them. We now, our kids all want to work with the EAs because, again, they’re focusing on students’ strengths. And how can we just get that 1% better every day?

Sam Demma
It strikes me that you’re someone who’s been so passionate about education and serving young people and creating welcoming communities. Did you know when you were a student growing up that you wanted to work in education or what did this pathway look like for you?

Andrea Michelutti
When I was younger, I always wanted to be a teacher, but I also wanted to work in business and I wanted to have those, you know, two jobs combined and I never knew what I wanted to do. In high school and in university, I had a chance to work with two Ontario Hockey League teams. I worked with the Sudbury Wolves and the Peterborough Peets. And those were those opportunities that taught me that skills of hospitality, relationships and team building.

Andrea Michelutti
And then I was able to tie that into my passion for always being a teacher. When I became an administrator, it kind of fell in my lap. I was very new to education. I believe I was about seven years in, and unfortunately my vice, the vice principal at the school got sick,

Andrea Michelutti
and at that time there wasn’t many people interested in going into leadership. So my principal tapped me on the shoulder and said, would you be interested in doing this role for about two weeks? That’s it, two weeks.

Andrea Michelutti
Now I’m at 17 years, which is incredible.

Sam Demma
What has been foundational in your professional development as you’ve worked in schools for over 20 years? Have you had mentors or resources that have been helpful?

Sam Demma
And if so, who are those people

Sam Demma
and what did they do for you and what are some of those resources?

Andrea Michelutti
So every time, like once I started in education, I really looked to different mentors. One of my biggest mentors was Charlie Smith. He was my first principal in Markham. And he was an athlete. He was always in the school,

Andrea Michelutti
and what I learned from him was being visible in the building and building those really strong connections at the same time as having that academic excellence. Under his leadership at his school, our EQAO scores for grade three were very, very low. We were at the bottom of the school board, and within three years, we were fourth in the school board.

Andrea Michelutti
And what I learned from him was good teaching, good relationships, resulted in great outcomes. Another one of my great mentors was a principal named Kristen Phillips, and she really taught everyone the importance of being kind, being present, but really pushing student achievement. It was a school where our academic scores were very low. And again, under her leadership,

Andrea Michelutti
we really targeted small group instruction, finding student strengths and moving on. But my biggest mentor ever was the general manager of the Peterborough Peaks from 95 to 99. He was there much before me and much longer after me, but his name was Jeff Tuey. And I just saw how he always treated everybody with kindness

Andrea Michelutti
and respect. It didn’t matter if you were, you know, just a fan coming to the game or if you were a general manager from an NHL team. The way he treated people was with kindness, knew their names, knew things about them, knew their family, knew their passions, and just sitting there, being in my early 20s, seeing that interaction, I’ve tried to really carry that on.

Sam Demma
Do these individuals know the contribution they’ve made to your professional development and personal life? I think they do.

Andrea Michelutti
I’m still in contact with Jeff Tuey. It was funny, because last year, he was up in Sudbury at a hockey game. I no longer live in Sudbury, and he ran into my family. And we exchanged pictures and our cell phone numbers, and I always reach out to him.

Andrea Michelutti
He’s one of those people where I just thought he is able to make things work. And so that’s been really great connecting. And Charlie Smith and Kristen Phillips, we do every once in a while keep in contact over Facebook. They’re both long retired.

Andrea Michelutti
Those are the people who really made my life in a different trajectory.

Sam Demma
With education and any heart-centered vocation, you’re always pouring into others, your staff members, the students in the building, the families you serve, that sometimes we forget to pour into ourselves. When you’re not in the school building or thinking about work, which is probably never.

Sam Demma
But when you have your time to pour into your own cup, how do you do that? What are some of the activities that fill you back up so you can be your whole self at work?

Andrea Michelutti
I’m really fortunate. I have a great family who’s always around me. And whenever I want to do something silly or crazy, they always embrace it. And it could be something like, you know, we wake up early in the morning.

Sam Demma
It’s important to do.

Andrea Michelutti
But it’s those little small connections with friends, with family, and sometimes in our jobs it’s really busy, but I always make sure that I carve out time for family every day.

Sam Demma
That’s so important. Do you come from a family of educators?

Sam Demma
My family went to university.

Andrea Michelutti
So my family had businesses up in Sudbury and I learned the the value of hard work and how when things are going well, they’re going really well. But during economic slowdowns things are really tough. And so what my parents always taught me was to be very appreciative of what you had and make sure that people always feel valued and welcomed in your life.

Sam Demma
Oh, amazing. You said that you’ve been an administrator for I believe now 17 years? That’s correct. What would you say is the big difference between working in the classroom

Sam Demma
and working as an administrator?

Andrea Michelutti
The biggest difference is the impact you make. So in the classroom you work with 20 to 30 students every day, but in a school I’m serving 700 students and supporting 70 staff members and families. So just seeing how the growth from students from grade 1 to grade to grade 8 and seeing the the gain staff makes is very different from being in the classroom to being in a leadership role.

Andrea Michelutti
I do have a lot of opportunities to teach. So if I’m having a tough day, sometimes I’ll go to a classroom and be like, give me a small group, or let me take a group of students. And so this year, my staff has been really working on how to improve their literacy skills, their math skills, and special education. We’re doing everything this year.

Andrea Michelutti
And so when we do have guest speakers, I’ll often say, I’ll take all the students to the library, do a little teaching so the students can work together. But the biggest impact is who we’re serving.

Sam Demma
If you were to think back to your first year

Sam Demma
as an administrator, I’m sure there’s still unique challenges that you’re solving now, but that first year must have been, in some ways, a learning experience. What are some of the advice you would give based on your own past experiences to

Sam Demma
other teachers who might be becoming administrators as they’re listening to this podcast. The one there’s two

Andrea Michelutti
pieces of advice. One is always be kind to others and two is always be kind to yourself. So my first year, I was very aware of all the mistakes I was making and then when I talk to those teachers or those principals, they never notice my mistakes. So I’ve really adopted the model of, if I have a really tough day and I’ve made a bad decision,

Andrea Michelutti
I’ll say, wow, that principal made a really bad decision, but Andrew McAloody is still a really good person. And so I think it’s really focusing on being, forgive yourself when you make those difficult decisions. And I always say, there was never a bad decision, it might just have been bad communication,

Andrea Michelutti
and what can you do differently?

Sam Demma
We’re getting very close to the new year. And when folks listen to this, it might be January or into February. What are you excited about moving into 2025? What I’m most excited about is seeing where our students grow. There are some students that have

Andrea Michelutti
made some significant gains in their literacy and math skills. And they’re just at the point of it’s all coming together, so they’re going to soar. I’m also really excited about thinking about how we can engage our families in different ways. I’m very hopeful for 2025, and I know it’s going to be a great year. I always say this year is the best year, but it turns out next year is the best year, and

Andrea Michelutti
the next year is the best year. And so that’s the great part about being in education is every year it keeps getting better and better. So one of my hopes for 2025 is just to make sure everybody feels a sense of belonging, a sense of happiness, and a sense of welcoming.

Sam Demma
Awesome, Andrea, thank you so much for taking time out of the busy schedule to share some of your ideas on the podcast. I appreciate it. I wish you nothing but the most amount of success and happiness into the new year

Sam Demma
with the school, both professionally and in your personal life, and I hope to stay connected. If somebody is listening to this and wants to share a note of gratitude or reach out, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Andrea Michelutti
Send me an email or reach out to me on X. It’s always important to have those connections. And just briefly, I had a student come back to me. I only worked with him for three months in 2016, and I said to him, I expect you to graduate. And he was a student who really doubted his abilities, but I saw something in him. And when he came back four years later, he just surprised me at the school with his

Andrea Michelutti
high school diploma, we’ve taken a picture, and it’s one of those moments I just will always cherish. Because he said, you believed in me, and I had to make sure I kept up to your high expectations. So I love when students come back, when families reach out, because it really makes those connections just that little stronger.

Sam Demma
I love that. Is the picture posted on your social media by any chance?

Andrea Michelutti
It is. I’ll send it to you. It’s one of those great things. And he actually did a video about our relationship. So that was one of those most important pieces, something I cherish.

Sam Demma
Oh, amazing. And what would your ex account profile be if someone did want to touch base?

Andrea Michelutti
It’s at Mickeludi A. So my last name followed by my first initial. So M-I-C-H-E-L-U-T-T-I-A.

Sam Demma
Andrea, thank you so much. This is a big pleasure.

Andrea Michelutti
Thank you so much, Sam, and keep doing the great work you’re doing. and keep doing the great work you’re doing. You’re changing the lives of many people.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Andrea Michelutti

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

January 30, 2025 by Education Educator Principals Student Success 0

Todd Nesloney – Director of Culture and Strategic Leadership for the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association (TEPSA)

Todd Nesloney – Director of Culture and Strategic Leadership for the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association (TEPSA)
About Todd Nesloney

Todd Nesloney is the Director of Culture and Strategic Leadership for the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association (TEPSA). He has also served as an award-winning principal of a PreK-5th Grade campus of over 775 students in a rural town in Texas. He has been recognized by the White House, John C Maxwell, the Center for Digital Education, National School Board Association, the BAMMYS, and more for his work in education and with children. Todd has written six books, including the runaway smash Kids Deserve It and his newest book Building Authenticity: A Blueprint for the Leader Inside You. He is passionate about doing whatever it takes for our students and teachers and helping others tell their story

Connect with Todd Nesloney: Email | Instagram | Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

TEPSA
Kids Deserve It
Building Authenticity: A Blueprint for the Leader Inside You

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 Demma, and today we are joined by Todd Nesloney. Todd is author to six books. He is a culture fanatic. He seems to be a superstar fan with the sweater he’s wearing in this interview. Yeah, all right, Star Wars fan, I should say.

Sam Demma
And although we’ve only known each other for a few minutes, has so much positive energy. Todd, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Todd Nesloney
Hey man, I’m super excited to be here and to get to chat today. So thank you for asking me to be here.

Sam Demma
Why teaching? Why education? Tell me more about your passion for creating the next generation of young leaders and principals and teachers.

Todd Nesloney
You know, I love when I get asked this question because I get to kind of reflect on my own path and know that, you know, my experience in school was one where I wasn’t really in trouble because I knew my mama would come up to that school and handle me. So I wasn’t ever going to get in trouble for any kind of reason. I had good grades. I did what I needed to do. And so because of that, I kind of like blended in really easily with the rest of the students.

Todd Nesloney
And so I don’t remember any of my teachers from school, not for good or for bad. I didn’t have any terrible teachers, but I don’t remember any teachers that really ever saw me. And so throughout school, when I was like, what do I want to do with my life?

Todd Nesloney
I was like, I want to work with kids in some capacity. I want to work with kids where when they leave me and working with me, they at least feel seen. And so I thought it was gonna be social work until I learned very quickly, I cannot disconnect myself emotionally

Todd Nesloney
from that kind of work, so it’s not for me. And I was like, teaching, I have several people in my family who are teachers, I can impact kids that way. And so I became a teacher, fell in love with it, never thought I would do anything outside the classroom. And then this opportunity to go and get your masters

Todd Nesloney
while you’re teaching came up and my co-teachers and I were like, let’s all do it together. It’s all virtual, we can work together and we did that. And then from there on, it just led to opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. And I’m the kind of person where if I’m feeling challenged

Todd Nesloney
by something, I wanna pursue it. And so I was like, well, you know what, I’m feeling really good right now in teaching. I feel like I’ve got a really good flow. I’m not really being as challenged as I have been in the past.

Todd Nesloney
Let me jump into this and try this. That looks fun and challenging. And so that led to me being a principal, which led to me speaking and presenting and consulting and also now with my to work at the Texas Elementary Principal Association.

Sam Demma
It sounds like needing to have a challenge is a consistent theme in your life. We just talked about it before we hit the record button regarding some of the books you’ve written and how those were big challenges and you never imagined you’d write the book and maybe that’s the reason why you did the first one and what a gift to the world. Can you tell us a little bit about some of your books that are relevant in education?

Sam Demma
Kids Deserve It, of course, we can start there maybe and then a few of your other projects.

Todd Nesloney
Yeah, you know, Kids Deserve It was crazy. I will never forget sitting around the table with my co-author at the time and hearing him. We were talking about like, let’s write something together. We were writing blog posts, it was really easy. And the phrase, Kids Deserve It,

Todd Nesloney
came up in the conversation. And we were like, hey, that’s a pretty cool phrase. And like, we could really run with that with a lot of these ideas that we have. And so the book was born from that and it took off far more than we were anticipating. Like I

Todd Nesloney
was like 12 copies this next year, that’s my goal. Like if I can sell 12, success! And then it just created this entire community, this movement, and when I wrote it I was like I’m done. Like I put everything into there, I will never write another book, that was so much work, my whole heart is on the page. And then, because I also don’t want to put something out into the world that there are so many versions of already. Like, I like to feel like I’m trailblazing or trying something new or pushing the boundaries, which is part of our tagline in Kids Deserve It.

Todd Nesloney
And so when my publisher kept saying, you’ve got more ideas, you’ve got more ideas, I was like, yeah, but I don’t have like a unique hook right now or anything. And that’s where the next book was born, which out of all my books, it is probably the one I’m proudest of. And that’s just because it’s called Stories from Web,

Todd Nesloney
because I worked at Web Elementary. And when I wrote my second book, it’s written very similarly to Kids Deserve It, except I utilized some advice one of my mentors gave me. His name’s Jimmy Casas, one of the most incredible speakers and authors in the world.

Todd Nesloney
And he said, Todd, I want you to remember that no matter how big of a microphone you are given, I want you to continue to amplify others louder than you amplify yourself. And that has always really stuck with me. And so when I was writing the second book, I was like, I only want to write this because I’m working with the most incredible people on the planet. Like these teachers at the school that I’m at,

Todd Nesloney
they’re doing amazing things and nobody knows because they’re not on social media or they’re not out there speaking. They’re like just nose to the grindstone, getting it done. And so I said, if I’m going to write a book, I want to feature their stories throughout it.

Todd Nesloney
So every chapter features stories from the custodians, to the teachers, to the instructional aides, to the assistant superintendent, just a reminder that everybody’s voice matters and every story matters. And then from there it led to a book about literacy because I started to fall in love with that, then to a book about student leadership, and then during the pandemic I got to write a book

Todd Nesloney
just filled of hope and inspiration. My first book, not for educators, just for anybody, that anybody can pick up and just get a dose of art and words on the page to inspire them. And then my newest book is all about leadership and how every one of us is a leader, whether you are leading at work, at home, or in your friendship circles, just with strategies on how to do that and do it well.

Sam Demma
When do you sleep, Todd?

Todd Nesloney
Great question. Now I don’t sleep at all because we’ve got three-and-a-half-year-old twins. But, you know, it’s funny because I get asked that a lot, like, how do I do all the things that I do? And I am very protective of my personal time as well. So I have really, my wife and I have communicated a lot

Todd Nesloney
about what is non-negotiable family time or any kind of those kind of things. But what I, this is where my ADHD becomes a superpower instead of a detriment, is that when I get super focused on something or attached to something, I can knock it out much quicker than when I’m distracted

Todd Nesloney
by a thousand things. So when I’m writing, it’s like when that inspiration hits me, I gotta shut the world out, give me two and a half hours, and I can get like 30 pages done. And so, and then when the inspiration’s gone, I’m like, well, I’ll be back in a week or two.

Todd Nesloney
Hopefully it’ll hit me again and then I can continue the work. Um, I I’m so jealous of like those authors who like locked themselves in a cabin for a week and come out with a book. I’m like, nah, I could never.

Sam Demma
You mentioned Webb, the school and the amazing staff. It sounds like the culture in that building is phenomenal. You’re someone who talks about culture, consults on culture, lives it, breathes it, and it’s a word that’s used so often in schools. How do you describe culture

Sam Demma
and how do you think you build a meaningful culture in an educational institution? You know, I think this came,

Todd Nesloney
this started with my classroom experience, coming from that idea of, I never want a student to leave my classroom and not have at some point had their core need met, which was, at the core of each of us is we want to feel seen, we want to feel heard, and we want to feel valued. And so my goal always is with interactions that I have with people, especially for an

Todd Nesloney
extended amount of time when I’m working with them or living life with them, I want to make sure that the things that I’m putting in place to connect with them is meeting one of those needs. Am I helping them feel seen? Am I helping them feel heard? Or am I helping them feel valued? Because if not, it’s just like icing on a cupcake. It’s just like it washes away. It’s sweet. It’s gone. Whatever. And so in

Todd Nesloney
the classroom that was so important. So when I became a principal, I was actually hired as part of my job was to fix the culture of the school. Because they had a 50% turnover every year. Scores were in the trash. And it was a lot of it was just the culture. Teachers didn’t believe in themselves, they didn’t believe in each other, and they didn’t believe in the kids because they’d been broken by the system. And so I was like, you know what? This is my new classroom. These are my new students. And so it’s always been

Todd Nesloney
such a passion of mine because I’m such a heart guy. And so when I work with people now, whether it’s in the corporate world, whether it’s in the education world, or even in a classroom experience, it still goes back to those three core needs.

Todd Nesloney
And my thing is, is like, you can do a lot of nice stuff. I’m from Texas, in the South, we have this phrase of you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. And you know, it’s kind of that idea of you can do nice things, but if you are still a jerk, your nice things make no difference. And so when I work with administrators, one of the examples that I use is I saw something go viral a few years ago. Fantastic idea.

Todd Nesloney
I did it. And it was the snack cart where they put all these snacks and drinks on a cart and they roll it down the hall and they’ll knock on a door and say, hey, we got some snacks and drinks for you. And I tell people, we as teachers, we love two things, free stuff and spending somebody else’s money. Like those are our top two things.

Todd Nesloney
And so I’m like, you bringing the snack cart, that’s not a bad thing at all. People will open their door, they’ll be excited about a free chips or a free drink. It’s not gonna change the way they feel about you because if I had a terrible supervisor

Todd Nesloney
and they brought me free chips, I’m still going to take your chips. I’m not going to like you anymore, but I’m still going to take your free stuff. And so I said, you know, that cart in and of itself does not impact culture. It’s not a bad thing. I’m not telling you not to do it. Everybody loves free stuff. But what I’m telling you is a cart full of random snacks and drinks does not make anybody feel seen, does not make anybody feel valued, or does not make anybody feel heard.

Todd Nesloney
The way you level up that idea is, one of the things we did on our campus was at the beginning of every year, I would send out a survey to my staff that said things like, who’s your emergency contact, t-shirt size, all that stuff we collect. But also, what’s your favorite salty snack?

Todd Nesloney
What’s your favorite sweet snack? What’s your favorite, if we had a local coffee shop, coffee from this coffee shop? If you’re gonna get a snack at a fast food restaurant, what restaurant are you gonna go to and what are you gonna get?

Todd Nesloney
And then we have something down here in the South that’s real big with teachers, and that’s called Sonic. That Sonic drink stop, I don’t know what it is about that Root 44 Diet Coke light ice with one squeeze of lime, but it’s like Oprah showed up at their classroom with a free car. Like it made people like break down in tears.

Todd Nesloney
And so we always had asked, what’s your favorite Sonic drink? So what we started doing on our campus was, instead of just bringing a random assortments of snacks and drinks, I would go to Sonic or to the store or whatever and grab that person’s favorite drink. So when I showed up at their door I’m like, hey I know it’s been

Todd Nesloney
rough this week, I can tell, I’ve heard it, I see it, I wanted to go and get you your drink at Sonic today and just tell you I hope your day gets better. And in that moment it has nothing to do with the drink and that’s what I try to help people see. It’s not about giving people free stuff because in that moment for the person that’s receiving their favorite drink, all that’s going through their head is, really, you thought of me uninitiated,

Todd Nesloney
and not only did you think of me, but you remembered something I shared with you about myself and brought something specific for me. That’s where you start to change culture slowly, is when people can see that you are invested in them, not invested in the whole.

Todd Nesloney
Because when you’re invested only in the whole, people go, oh, so if I don’t show up, nothing really changes because nobody even noticed I wasn’t here. And that’s how you get people who start to not work as hard,

Todd Nesloney
who start to take days off for no reason, who start to look for jobs elsewhere. My campus that I worked on, we could not offer the salary that districts 20 miles up the road from us could offer. We could not offer some of the resources.

Todd Nesloney
But when I hired people, I told them, what I can offer you is a place where I will work every day to fulfill all those needs you have as a classroom teacher and celebrate you and build you up and give you the resources. We’re not perfect. Nobody is. But I can promise you that we work hard to invest in our people here.

Todd Nesloney
And that was kind of one of the selling points. And so when I work with people in all kinds of leadership positions, and if you’re a classroom teacher listening, you are in a leadership position. So don’t think you aren’t, just because you don’t get paid, when some of those leaders up top get paid. People are still watching you, ears are still listening to you,

Todd Nesloney
you’re still leading, whether you want to or not. And so it’s all about how are you making others feel seen, valued and heard.

Sam Demma
Can you think of an experience where someone made you feel seen, valued and heard? And maybe you are not expecting it. And the reason I bring it up is because sometimes what seems insignificant to us can mean the absolute world to another human being because we have no idea what someone else is going through. In the context of a school, sometimes we do know if someone’s having a rough week, but sometimes the moments that have the greatest impact is when we have no idea

Sam Demma
that someone else is struggling and we go out of our way to try and make them feel seen and heard. And it could be something they remember for the rest of their lives. And I’m just curious, have you had a moment like that in your life that’s inspired you to do more of this work?

Todd Nesloney
You know, I can think of little things along the way. Something that’s always meant a lot to me is just the acknowledgement of my presence. I think sometimes when you spend a lot of time pouring into others, you also spend a lot of time trying not to be the focus of the moment or the space. And my personality, I’m super, super introverted. And people don’t believe that because they see me present, do all this other stuff, and I’m like,

Todd Nesloney
no, that’s the extrovert time, and then it’s gone. And then I need quiet time in the car or whatever. So when I enter spaces, I often shrink myself because it’s like I’m uncomfortable, I am just trying to pour into others, I’m not focusing on me, and so it’s very easy for me

Todd Nesloney
to leave some of those spaces and not feel like anybody even noticed I was there if I wasn’t trying to be the focus. But at the same time, one of the things I talk about in a lot of my messages is the power of a phone call. And how it’s a completely free resource that you have, but how we were doing it with our students. And then I realized, oh, my gosh, if things weren’t great for students, they will work great for the adults, too.

Todd Nesloney
And so I started this positive phone call thing with the adults on our campus. And my assistant principal was one of my first ones that I did. I called home to his mom with him there on speakerphone, celebrated him in front of his mom. He said it was the coolest experience just to have somebody you that’s in your life celebrate you in front of somebody that you love so much.

Todd Nesloney
And he’s like, as adults, people don’t do that. Like that’s a kid thing. And he said, I’ve never felt that emotion before. And so I talk about that in my messages about how I think all of us anytime we enter a space with more than three or four people we should pull out our phone and be like oh my god Julie you are freaking amazing who can I call right now to celebrate you in front

Todd Nesloney
of and I said people are gonna say oh you don’t have to do that and we trained our staff to be like no that’s what we do here let us love you and it takes a minute to two minutes of the time. So I was sharing about that at a presentation. Afterwards, I finished, everybody went and did their thing. I was talking to some people afterwards, and this gentleman came up and he was like, I really loved what you had to share about that phone call. He said, I want to do that for you now.

Todd Nesloney
Who can I call? And I was like, um, no, no, no, no. Like I talk about this. Like you don’t have to do this for me. Like no. And he was like, no, what do we say Todd?

Todd Nesloney
Let us love you. And I was like, and I got so uncomfortable. I was like, oh my God, like I talk about this, but I didn’t want people to do it to me. Like what, what the heck? This is where my introvertness like takes over. And I like, oh my God.

Todd Nesloney
And so I was like, I don’t know, I guess my wife. And so he was like, okay, call her up, put her on speakerphone. And so in the midst of this foyer, of this space, where all these people are coming and going, I call my wife and she’s like, hello.

Todd Nesloney
And I was like, you are on speakerphone, I am fine. I was like, because she knew I was at work, she’s like, what’s going on? And I was like, hey, somebody wanted to talk to you real quick. She’s like, okay, and he takes the phone and he was like, Hey, I just gotta say your husband just spoke to us. It was

Todd Nesloney
incredible. You are you’re so lucky to get to have him and we’re so thankful that you shared him with like all the stuff that I share, like how we did the phone calls. And I got so emotional in the moment, feeling that reciprocated what I had talked about doing for others and what we had done for years at our school. And as soon as we were done, I was just like, I didn’t know what to say. Like, I was like, thank you, that really meant a lot. And this was like, probably years ago. And I still think about it at least once a week. And anytime I talk about this, I had spent so much time pouring this idea into others and sharing that it not had always been reciprocated for me, which I wasn’t time pouring this idea into others and sharing that it not

Todd Nesloney
had always been reciprocated for me, which I wasn’t asking it to be. And so I don’t want that to be part of the story. But when it had been done, and I experienced it as well, unexpectedly, like not part of a, oh, yeah, this is Tuesday, who are we calling kind of thing. It was, it was game changing for me. And so I think that that was one of those moments that I was like, okay, yep, I got to

Todd Nesloney
experience it from this other side, instead of being the one experiencing it, the excitement from seeing the joy on someone else’s face. I got to feel that deep emotion of being celebrated and then having my wife call me hours later and be like, that was so cool. Like, why did you do that? Like, did you tell him to do that? And I was like, no, I was not going to listen to the president. I did not want that to be done. It was so uncomfortable, but I loved it at the same time.

Todd Nesloney
Like it’s so, and sometimes those really uncomfortable things, we do need to put ourselves through because it leads to so many great things down the road.

Sam Demma
I love the story.

Sam Demma
I hope it’s in one of your books. It sounds like you have so many phenomenal ideas, not only for educators, but this idea of celebrating folks with the people that matter most in their lives over the phone can be done at any point,

Sam Demma
any day with anybody. And I love it. If you could wave a magic wand and change, you know, certain things in education across the globe, are there any things you would start with or things that you think, if these three things shifted

Sam Demma
or these one or two things shifted in schools that would have a massive ripple effect? If so, what would those things be?

Todd Nesloney
Sam, do you have like three more hours? That’s a pretty big question. No, you know, there’s so many different elements and I feel like it’s shifting some of those, some of the things that we are dealing with are shifting continually.

Todd Nesloney
And with my role now in education, especially where I get to work with administrators across the state on a daily basis, in addition to all my speaking and consulting that I do worldwide, I get to hear a lot of different sides of what’s happening.

Todd Nesloney
And so I think the answer to your question is, I think there’s a big change I would make in the administration world, and there’s some big changes I would make in the teaching world. For teachers, specifically,

Todd Nesloney
we have to be trusted to do what we do. And I feel like there are a lot of things we could complain about in education right now, but to me, a lot of it boils down to we aren’t trusted to do our jobs. Whether that is the books we choose to read

Todd Nesloney
in the classroom, the discipline and social emotional things we put into play, the lesson planning, the curriculum, there’s so many elements that it’s like, you aren’t trusted to do this, so we’re gonna have this committee decide it for you, and then we’re gonna need you to write six pages

Todd Nesloney
over how you’re gonna do this, and then we’re gonna need you to grade it all, and then we’re gonna need you to meet for all these meetings, and then we’re gonna need you to have all the data that you’re gonna organize and write a report over as well, and it’s like, okay, when am I supposed to teach?

Todd Nesloney
Because, like, all the things you want from me suck out all the joy of why I got to do this, which was teaching. And so, I mean, we could go into the amount of discipline that we’re dealing with right now. We could go into lack of support from admin sometimes.

Todd Nesloney
There’s a lot of elements and I think everybody experiences the education profession a little bit differently, but I feel like there’s so much more celebration that needs to happen with those humans that are giving their lives up

Todd Nesloney
and often their family relationships, their friendships, to invest so deeply. Because I think that was an unexpected element for me when I became a teacher, was how deeply emotionally invested we get in your children.

Todd Nesloney
And I think that so many parents don’t realize that. And are there bad seed teachers? Yes, but there’s bad seeds in every profession. I mean, go to McDonald’s, there’s somebody there not doing their job. Go to the grocery store,

Todd Nesloney
there’s somebody there not doing their job. Like, that’s not unique to teaching and there’s always gonna be people who make poor decisions and that reflect on all of us. But when I think of administration, what I would say to teachers is, I thought I knew what an administrator did until I became an administrator. And I think administrators often get a bad rap because of decisions that they have to make or split second things or anything like that.

Todd Nesloney
And are there bad administrators? Yes. I mean, we just said there are bad people in every position everywhere. But on the whole, it is so much harder being an administrator than I ever imagined because of the weight that they carry that nobody else can help them carry. As a teacher, I can carry weight and lean on my colleagues, reach out to my supervisor, talk about brainstorm. As an administrator, like I have to deal with it or I have to go in to court and talk about a CPS case. I have to deal with parents berating me or staff upset or community. I mean, it’s a lot. And so for teachers listening, I would say, if you have an administrator that you

Todd Nesloney
respect at all, let them know how much you appreciate them. Because administrators spend at least 75% of their day being told what they’re not doing right or what they’re not good enough at. And that is so emotionally draining that when you have a great administrator, you better build them up and hug them and love them because they are using the 25% they have left to give you all of it. And so I think sometimes we forget about that.

Todd Nesloney
And this is not saying that teachers don’t also give, this is not a us versus them. We have to get out of that mindset. What I’m saying is, as a teacher, I swore I knew what that principal or assistant principal was doing.

Todd Nesloney
I swore I could get in that job and do things differently or better, and until I was actually in that position, I realized I had no idea. And I went to my principal after I was hired and was a principal for a year,

Todd Nesloney
I went to my previous principal and I apologized. And I told her, I said, I did not tell you thank you enough. Like I did not see these little things you were doing that I thought were just naturally happening. And now I realized you were behind them

Todd Nesloney
and you weren’t telling anybody because that’s not what you do. And so if you think, well, yeah, whatever Todd, I do know what my principal does, it’s nothing. Well, I can guarantee they do something, but think about when you were in college.

Todd Nesloney
You swore you knew what a teacher did, that’s why you wanted to become a teacher. And then you got that first teaching job and you realized everybody lied to you. There’s a thousand more things that you have to do as a teacher than anybody ever told you about.

Todd Nesloney
So just the idea, let’s spend more time celebrating. Let’s spend more time giving each other grace, and building those relationships and really connecting with each other. I think that that’s where we can begin to see a change. So to answer your question in a roundabout way,

Todd Nesloney
there’s a lot that we can change about education, and there always will be, because there’s a lot when you get hired by any group that you will wanna change. But I think for me, I wish teachers were more celebrated, I wish they were more respected,

Todd Nesloney
and I wish they were more trusted to do what they need to do. And I think if those things happen, we would see a lot of other things fall more easily into place.

Sam Demma
Trusted, respected, and celebrated. Todd, I appreciate your time on the show. It’s been a pleasure. I look forward to staying connected and hearing about the work you’re doing in your world. Where can educators listening to this find you or reach out and celebrate you

Sam Demma
if they’re inspired by this conversation today?

Todd Nesloney
Well, I think my easiest place is my website, which is just toddnesloney.com. You can just Google Todd Nesloney. If you spell it wrong, it’ll come up. There’s only so many ways you can spell Nesloney. But I am active on every social media platform. Most of them I’m Tech Ninja Todd or Todd Nesloney and I’ve got blogs, videos, books, all that kind of stuff on my site too.

Todd Nesloney
So definitely would love to connect.

Sam Demma
Awesome, Todd, keep up the great work and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. to come on the show.

Todd Nesloney
Thanks, man.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Todd Nesloney

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

January 16, 2025 by Author Director of Education Education Student Success 0

Jeff Armour – Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the University Students’ Council (USC) at Western University

Jeff Armour – Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the University Students’ Council (USC) at Western University
About Jeff Armour

Jeff Armour is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the University Students’ Council (USC) at Western University.  Jeff graduated with a B.Sc. from Western University and after a few years of service overseeing the Wave and Spoke restaurant and bars on campus the USC encouraged Jeff to enroll in the Project Management program through Western’s Continuing Studies. Jeff was subsequently promoted to higher-level leadership position in the organization until ultimately landing at the COO role he currently holds.  Jeff also recently completed his EMBA at Ivey in July 2023.
 
Jeff has an extensive background in strategic planning, project management, operations restructuring and realignment, change management and financial strategy.
 
Jeff is married to Mindy and has three children, Kennedee, Ben and Brad.  He was born in BC but grew up in Peterborough, Jeff moved to London for school at Western and never left. 

Connect with Jeff Armour: Email | Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

University Students’ Council (USC)
Western University
Ivey

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 Demma. And today we are joined by Jeff Armour. Jeff and I, we met each other a few years ago and we’ve stayed in touch. Personally, I’m super inspired by the Student Union, the USC at Western that they operate and that Jeff organizes and supports.

Sam Demma
And they do incredible things in the post-secondary space. And I’m honored to have Jeff on the show again. Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

Jeff Armour
Hey, thanks for inviting me. I guess the first one you can get lucky on, the second one means maybe I did something right. So that’s good.

Sam Demma
I really enjoyed the conversation. And I know this is gonna be just as valuable. There’s so many ways we could take this conversation and different things we could talk about. One of the things I’m most inspired about with your leadership at the USC is every team member seems like the most phenomenal human being. I have some of the most memorable experiences working with you and your staff. Where do you find these amazing human beings? How, like, where do they come from?

Jeff Armour
Wow, there’s two different answers there, I think. The one that’s like maybe the romantic answer is, I think setting a culture and having a purpose-driven organization attracts certain people. That, you know, the old adage at McDonald’s where they say there were smiles on the menu and those were free, and they were selling burgers and fries, but what they were really selling was smiles. I think people come here because they know we’re selling smiles to students. So although they might be a great accountant or a great productions person or a great clubs facilitator or even the people in HR, I think everybody rallies behind the idea that we’re trying to make students smile and enhance the educational experience, which is our mission statement.

Jeff Armour
So that’s the cheesy, super inspirational, like “I’ve got it all figured out” answer. The more, maybe more real answer is, I think there’s a certain amount of luck there. There’s a certain amount of strong leadership about, you know, what type of behaviors and what type of people we want to have here, which obviously changes things a little bit. And then the final piece of that is, when you’ve got something good going on, people like to talk to their friends or the other people they work with, and it spreads pretty quickly. So that’s lovely to see when you’re bringing other people into the fold of what you’re doing.

Sam Demma
I think when it comes to teams, the teams that operate really effectively have cohesion and they’re all unified by that single mission or purpose. And they voice their thoughts and their feelings and have these thoughtful disagreements so they can come up with the best ideas and move forward as a committed, I guess, team of people. How do you think about building that team and encouraging cohesion amongst members of the whole organization?

Jeff Armour
Yeah, well, I think you said it right at the outset, what is ultimately the goal? In a for-profit entity, you get a lot of infighting, I think, because the goal is making money. And sometimes to make money, you’ve got to step on some toes a little bit. And there’s some one-upmanship going on there in competition, which creates perhaps a better value or more profit when you have that sort of infighting.

Jeff Armour
When you’re centered on purpose, and as long as the leader can set a pretty clear goal of, I mean, I guess I just talked about putting smiles on students’ faces, everyone can get behind that. And the one-upmanship is not stepping on other people’s toes, but it’s more like improv: yes and, you know, as opposed to no, but maybe we could do something else. You get a lot of yes ands. “That’s a great idea. And you know what else would be good is this.” So it’s more like piling on in terms of contribution as opposed to ripping it down to try and one-up to make sure that, you know, you get the promotion or the bigger bonus.

Jeff Armour
That is definitely a major focus around here. Failure isn’t the negative. Not trying is the thing we don’t want to see. Just keep trying. You make a mistake, great, we won’t have to make that one again. That’s another one off the list. So it creates a good environment where everyone wants to jump in and see what other ideas they’ve got or, you know, kind of do the yes and.

Sam Demma
I was recently golfing with my godfather and he’s a big reader of books, and he told me to check out this book called Principles by Ray Dalio. And it was all about his life and work principles that he had operated on for a long time. And one of them was, “We celebrate mistakes but don’t tolerate not learning from them.” They had this software in his organization called the issue log. And every time you made a mistake, it was your responsibility to log it and to share it.

Sam Demma
So you put the date and the time and the mistake you made, and the next sync with the whole team, you would talk about it openly so that everyone could learn from the same mistake that just one person made, and then talk about how to avoid it moving forward. And when you’re talking about celebrating mistakes, that whole idea came to mind. How did you build that culture of celebrating mistakes? Is it something similar? Or like, what did you do?

Jeff Armour
It’s just funny because when I took on this role as the COO, formerly the general manager, we were very, very siloed. So no one wanted to talk about their mistakes, right? Despite the immense amount of value. And so because of that, there was no history written. And because of that, we were destined to make the same mistakes over and over again, which is exactly what we were doing. Which was creating a lot of frustration in people that wanted to be here and improve on it and build towards those smiles and great experiences.

Jeff Armour
It was like, “But why are we… like I get it, but why are we… like I’ll try. You’re paying me. Why are we doing the same thing again? I have this other idea. If we could have just turned that one thing and made it better.” And I’m kind of blowing it here, but when I first took on the role, there’s many things that I did, starting with, like, I reintroduced myself to the team. Like literally did a PowerPoint and said, like, “You’ve known me because I was here for probably 15 years before that and reintroduced myself to the team, my senior management team, and basically said, so, you know Jeff, but you don’t, you don’t know Jeff.”

Jeff Armour
The next thing I did was quietly without labeling it—because I like that—what did you call it? A log of…

Sam Demma
They called it the issues log.

Jeff Armour
Issues log. So I was regularly having meetings as I started to do some change management on the culture of our team—not change management like we’re getting into new products or whatever—it was more of culture change. And I would strategically every other meeting or every, you know, I tried to make it not rhythmic so people started to pick up on it. But I talk about, like, one of the mistakes I made early on. Like, “Oh, coming in this job, I know I, and I made this, I did this thing or whatever.” And what started to happen was they would laugh along with me. But not only that, contribute to ideas of how we could avoid that in the future.

Jeff Armour
And I say I’m kind of letting the lid off this because some of them will, if they hear this, will be like, “Wait, you were doing that on purpose?” Like, I don’t want to make it seem like it was contrived, but really, we weren’t talking about our failures. And when I say failures, I mean, like, it’s a chance to learn or otherwise. So instead, what we would do is someone who you would think would have no opinion on an item—let’s say it was something that we made a mistake in budget—and then someone who’s nowhere near the budget process would be like, “Why didn’t you just ask us about what we were going to… like, that would have helped you avoid that mistake three months later.”

Jeff Armour
And I was like, “Oh, that’s… you know, write it down. Then you make sure you follow up.” Then you start to… and suddenly people can see that change and improvement on mistakes. But not only that, subconsciously, they’re thinking, it’s OK if I bring up a mistake I made. Maybe other people have good ideas because no one’s ever asked me about the budget thing. And now I was able to contribute to a positive outcome, right? It’s like teaching. It’s like a learned behavior that you’re not explicitly teaching them about. Because if I came out and said, “We’re going to…,” they’d be like, “Oh, great. He’s read some books, and he’s trying to… whatever.” Instead, it was like mimicking the behaviors I wanted to see the entire corporation do, like everybody, right down to the person who’s cutting the bagel being like, “Why do we cut the bagels before the person orders it? Like, it takes three seconds, and if we had one of these little machines, we could just…” Great, let’s hear about that.

Jeff Armour
And no one should have their feelings hurt. You should have your feelings hurt if you’re not listening, or you continue to not learn from it—not by not trying, right? It’s just the effort that counts. So the reason I was smiling when you asked the question is because it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to have to tell them the truth, and it’s going to probably be a little whistleblower here on my behaviors,” but yeah.

Sam Demma
Well, I think at the end of the day, it also gives other people permission, like you said, to voice their mistakes. Like you’re actually, as the leader, leading with vulnerability by saying, “Here’s a mistake I made.” And that vulnerability you’re leading with is allowing other people at the table to say, “Hey, it’s OK to be vulnerable.”

Sam Demma
Because if Jeff’s leading us and Jeff’s being vulnerable, so can I. Do you think it’s really important that you did that first? Like if you didn’t share, do you think other people would have shared, or would it have taken a much longer time for that to unfold?

Jeff Armour
I think, yeah, it definitely would have taken longer for it to unfold. Yeah, that’s… I think that’s fair to say. I think I’ve also always just been a person that, like, if I’m going to ask you to do it, I better do it first. Like literally in, like, physical actions. Like if I’m telling you to move that pile of dirt over there, I better be the first person to put the shovel in the ground and, like, to help move the dirt. And then, you know, I always prefer when people that I’m working with or that, you know, are trying to buy into something to be like, “Hey, I’ve got this dirt thing. Why don’t you go over there and start to build that wall so then I can come over and paint,” you know, or otherwise.

Jeff Armour
Like once they can see why they’re doing something and how they fit into the bigger picture, to start to push leadership or someone who’s helping them into where they should be is way better than saying, “I’m in leadership. Do as I say and, like, figure it out on your own.” I don’t know, it just feels like that’s… I don’t know, yucky, kind of condescending, or I don’t know, more like a boss, right?

Sam Demma
Do you trust your intuition and gut on a lot of the decisions you make, or do you have principles or, like, certain guardrails that you think about before you make a decision?

Jeff Armour
Yeah. I’m learning to trust that more.

Sam Demma
Yeah.

Jeff Armour
Here I am at my age now, where I’m at in my career. And we actually, just last week, did StrengthsFinder with the senior leadership team here, the senior managers we’ve got. And my strengths, which make me uncomfortable—and I don’t think I’m sharing that out of turn—they make me uncomfortable because they’re kind of like traditional, hard strengths I’m not super comfortable with.

Jeff Armour
However, because of that, I haven’t really trusted it in the past, which I think has made me more of an authentic leader. Like that kind of… Are you familiar with the Gallup StrengthsFinder stuff?

Sam Demma
I don’t know too much about it, other than it’s like similar to other personality tests to figure out how people can deal with one another, understand how they operate. That’s why—but I could be wrong.

Jeff Armour
No, no, that’s basically it. I mean, the only real big difference is it’s a Gallup-founded test, which means there’s like a hundred billion data points that Gallup has because they do surveys all the time. So it’s like really… And it’s shocking how close it is. It’s amazing insights. So yeah, to get back to the question of, like, do I trust it? I don’t, but I think that’s actually what makes me good.

Jeff Armour
I’m naturally a pessimist with a very strong optimistic outlook. I can see the negative side, but I’m always like, there’s this terrible thing that could happen, but you know what? It’s going to be awesome. So I’m literally built to prepare for the worst and plan for the best. Like it’s ingrained in my DNA to actually do that. So yeah, I don’t really trust… I really trust the people that are around me. If I’m half-hearted into something or they’re not sure if I’m sure, they’ll either give me the resolve or push me a little bit to get to that solid place because I think they trust my instincts more than I trust my own.

Sam Demma
It’s probably not a good answer, but I mean, that’s the truth—is I’m a little cautious with my gut.

Jeff Armour
I think that that’s so important. I think it’s one of the reasons why the organization, the USC, succeeds because if you do just consistently put your eggs in one basket and you feel like, “This is the best decision ever, we’re doing the right thing,” and you don’t ever think, “Well, what if we could be wrong?” you might have some blind spots, and you overcommit too many times. Things can fall apart. Who do you ask, or, like, how do you ask when you have those thoughts?

Jeff Armour
I think the best part about it now, where we’re at, initially I had sort of a small group of people that knew me and knew who I was that I could be not just vulnerable with, but, like, weak. Quite literally just be like, “This is tough.” And early on in the job, there were several things that tested my resolve. And then, you know, middle of the bell curve was COVID, which again, tested things.

Jeff Armour
And in the first chat we had, we talked about my decision to bring everybody back in full. There was no hybrid, which now, I guess, it’s been two years since we did that podcast, I think, or a year or whatever. It’s just showing in droves how great the culture is here. And there’s no group at home and group at work and all of that. Great for… we’re really, like, for the listeners here, we’re really an in-person impact. Like the student walks into your office and says, “Hey, I need some help.” Really hard to schedule a Zoom with people when they’re just walking in. You know, you can’t predict when it’s going to happen. It’s kind of like, you know…

Jeff Armour
So yeah, that’s sort of when I started to realize that my gut instinct was probably pretty strong because I ask a lot of questions. I’m, I think, a good listener. I know where we want to go to. And so what happens is every interaction I have, whether it’s just walking through the halls or otherwise, goes into my brain, unfortunately. It doesn’t add stress to me, but it adds data points. And those data points help me formulate an opinion that makes my gut call a little bit stronger.

Jeff Armour
And this is all stuff that I’ve learned over the last, probably even like last two months as we’ve really gotten into the StrengthsFinder stuff and realized that that is the way I operate. I used to be afraid of it because I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand where that gut… like, nobody just has gut instincts like that. The gut instinct comes from like listening and actively challenging, but also being a pessimist and looking out for the worst, but also hoping for the best. So all those things come together to make it, yeah, what I use.

Jeff Armour
Small group initially, and now I don’t even have to ask for opinions when I’m looking at making a decision or there’s something that’s challenging the group. Everyone feels very comfortable walking into my door and just being like, “Hey, I know this is a problem we’ve got, and I wonder if this would help. I found this article, and here you go. Do you want to read it?” And then you can go even deeper, like, “Oh, interesting, what kind of triggered you? Like, what made you resonate with this challenge that we’re facing?” And it’s like, “Well, I think it’s really important because I see every single day X, Y, and Z.” More data points to go in for the analytical, more information, more comfort with talking to what, in a traditional model, would be like the leadership.

Jeff Armour
And I use that loosely. Because I don’t necessarily believe in, like, there’s got to be one boss. I believe, like, the hive mind works to a certain extent, but at some point, someone has to make a decision, and I get that, right? So I really encourage that. And I think the open-door policy and willingness to listen, and not being afraid that someone has a different opinion than I do, and that means I’m not going to make a decision because they differ with it. I’m great with that because it’s just more data points, right?

Sam Demma
I mean, you’re sharing principles with me right now, like, you know, plan for the worst, but expect the best. The open-door policy, gather information, you know, be a good listener to make the best-informed decision. If I was to chat with members of the USC, other people on the team, and sit them down and say, “What does Jeff say to you most often?” Like, if you were to tell me, “These are Jeff’s, like, maybe not just Jeff’s, but these are the USC’s values or principles and things that we hear over and over and over again,” what are a few of those things or some that stick out in your mind that you think they’d share with me?

Jeff Armour
Yeah, well, some are very USC-specific, that were student-led. Yep. Which, that’s a value we hold—that at the end of the day, there should be a student at the table. I’m not just talking about the president—obviously, the president—but like a student. So if you’re making decisions around clubs, there should be members from the club system involved in making that decision, right? Because they know better than we do.

Jeff Armour
That’s the best way to protect against aging out in an organization that essentially—we’re vampire keepers. The vampires stay 22, 20 years old, and we get older and older, and they stay the same age, right? So the best way to insulate against that is to get as many of them around the table to make the decisions and help you with it. So that’s a big principle that used to scare us. Any student association, I think, would be scared because it’s like, “Wow, I personally am getting out of touch with what that generation wants.” Right? I don’t know what skibbity bathwater means. I don’t understand. Like, it was a couple of years ago.

Jeff Armour
But I don’t have to keep up with that. And the reason I know those words is because there are students around me all the time who are open to sharing with me, just like the clubs’ decision, just like if there’s something that’s going on around designing our menu. Don’t ask someone who’s 45 what they want on the menu because they want nachos and chicken wings, which I definitely want. But maybe the bowls are really hot, or maybe having halal chicken is really important to a large chunk of our… So all those things—students around the table. That’s the USC sort of thing—is that we’re student-led, OK?

Jeff Armour
For me personally, there are two things that are very important, and that is trying. I want to see people trying all the time because I believe that’s where the good stuff happens. Keep trying. I’ve already said it to you earlier on in the interview. You can see that they will hear that. And then from the management leadership realm, it’s delegate, right? Great. You’re great at that. Delegate it. Because I’ve got other stuff that I want to delegate to you. Delegate, delegate.

Sam Demma
And what would be the fear with delegating?

Jeff Armour
That they’re not going to do a good job, or it’s going to get done wrong.

Sam Demma
I still feel it. How do you—like, tell me more.

Jeff Armour
And so then they’re going to… Not just you making mistakes, you’re afraid to try, the people you’re delegating to are going to make a mistake, and you’re going to have to talk to them about that mistake. And not a lot of people have that type of ability to have a restorative, generative conversation with someone who’s made a mistake because they’re feeling bad, right?

Sam Demma
Yep.

Jeff Armour
You feel like you missed a step because you said they did fail. But changing the paradigm of that into a conversation where it’s like, “What did we learn?” And going back to the thing I did on, like, the second week, where I talked about the thing that I failed on—try and mimic that. Like, “Let’s get better together.” That’s a hard thing for people in general to—I mean, it sounds really easy here. I’m, you know, 20 minutes into the podcast or whatever, but like, it’s not easy to do.

Jeff Armour
Those are the conversations. That’s the good stuff in there—is when you can get someone, I think, like I’m trying to do, to press upon people, like, you know, go ahead and make mistakes, and then go and encourage the people that report to you to make mistakes, and then support them in it, right? Those are probably the two things that, like, is a Jeff-ism. And then the one thing is the USC thing—it’s like student-led is a big, important thing.

Sam Demma
That’s awesome. The idea of delegation is something that’s very real for me right now. And I’m sure a lot of the school divisions that I serve and support, their leadership teams delegate a lot. And I’ve been working with an assistant for a little while, and I’ve struggled with the delegation situation.

Sam Demma
And I have the best friggin’ team in the world. When things are going great, it’s her. She’s rocking it, you know, and things are not going great, it’s because I’m in my head, and I’m like not sitting in my best position and being a good leader. How did you build that skill yourself? Was it just the repetition of those types of conversations, or what did you find helpful?

Jeff Armour
I think… geez, that’s a great question. I don’t know where that started or when I started to do that. It might have been—we talked about it in the first one, I’m sorry if I’m repeating a little bit—the construction realm.

Sam Demma
Yes.

Jeff Armour
Right, where I had a high expectation of quality, right? And so then what I would do is—funny story, during COVID, we’re at home, and I quickly realized that the school was okay. Everybody was doing the best they could, just homeschooling and all the rest, but the kids weren’t getting the stimulation necessarily at the level that at least my children needed, which was like, “What am I learning that’s new, and how am I interacting with someone getting immediate feedback on whether it’s going well or not?”

Jeff Armour
So for each child, I had a different little thing that I would do with them. Like my youngest, for example, I taught him literally how to make coffee. Like we have a brewer at home where he would put the grind in. So he’s seven years old, eight years old—which is… that’s it. There’s hot water. You got to fill the water up, you got to hit the right buttons, and, you know, make sure it’s not coming out too hard, you know, too stiff or otherwise, it’s the right mix. Taught him how to do it, taught him where the cream was, and to put a little bit of this in and that sort of thing.

Jeff Armour
And so I would just go down, turn my Zoom on at 9:00 a.m., 8:00 a.m., whenever the meeting was, and get into it. And so people started to see this seven, eight-year-old bringing me a coffee. And to them, it was like, “What the… what are you doing to him?” He still talks about it today. He still talks about being trusted to do something for Dad, learning how to do it.

Jeff Armour
And he started to get better at it, right? And started to measure the sugar as opposed to just pouring in the sugar and starting to whatever, and then reinforcing that with feedback right away. “That might have been your best one yet. Surprising, because I normally like a lot of cream, but there wasn’t as much, and I didn’t put as much in this time,” right? And the reward that comes from delegation and feedback, positive or negative, and how that fills up the human spirit to continue to try—there’s that word again—I think is an algorithm, a formula that feeds the human soul that makes them want to even do more and more and more, right?

Jeff Armour
Because then the next question was, you know, “Do you want some eggs? Do you want to do this?” And suddenly it starts to grow. And, you know, some people may look at it like, “I was just happy my kid was getting through the day. This was a terrible time for everyone.” I’m like, “Here’s a chance for them—for me—to engage with them as their parent, but also for them to learn and get confident doing things that they wouldn’t normally ever do.” Same principles apply at work. Same thing applied at the construction job.

Jeff Armour
I think that delegation gives the opportunity to fail safely, grow as a team, and, on top of that, have good conversations about what the ultimate why is. Like, where are we going here? Why does Dad want a coffee in the morning? He has a coffee every morning, and if I can do that for him, he can get to work and get on the Zoom later. He might be able to spend more time with me in the morning doing whatever. And those conversations as well. There’s so much good stuff that comes from delegating, in my opinion.

Jeff Armour
It’s scary though, right? Like you’re experiencing it, to your point of, like, “Okay, well…” And also there’s the—I don’t know if you feel guilt about it as well, delegating a little bit.

Sam Demma
I do sometimes feel like it’s irresponsible of me to say, “You do that, not you do this, but can you please help with this?” And it makes me feel… it does make me feel a little guilty, yeah.

Jeff Armour
Because, well, from a selfish perspective, the time it took you to ask, “Hey, I want to move that one o’clock to a two o’clock,” you could have just done it, right? And then you think about how that person is that sees you move it and does it. And suddenly that person has committed their working life to you and being good for you. And suddenly it’s like, “Oh, like, maybe I did that wrong.” And maybe you didn’t catch it because you did it in a moment.

Jeff Armour
But the negative side of not delegating and making sure that that person’s feeling like they’re reaffirmed can also be super damaging. Like it goes both ways. And we don’t think about it that way because we don’t want to bother anyone. I don’t know if that’s Canadian or if that’s just general—the entire world can’t be the Mad Men series where it’s like, “Get me a sandwich.” But there’s some value in actual delegation of a task with some feedback, and I think it’s super important.

Sam Demma
When you are delegating a task, are you front-loading the conversation with “Here’s why”? Like, you know, when you give the example of your son making the coffee, that conversation around “Here’s why we do this” is very helpful because when someone knows why you’re giving them a task and why it matters and it’s important, it’s going to encourage them to feel good about the work they’re doing because it’s serving the greater purpose. But when do you have those conversations in the delegation process?

Jeff Armour
Well, if it’s not obvious, like at the outset—which has become more prevalent here anyways—people will see an opportunity, and often they’re like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if I could just do this thing for you, and then you wouldn’t be tied up with it, and we can… you could do that.” That’s happening more and more. But if that isn’t the case, and I’m like, “Hey, so I’ve been thinking about something, and one thing I noticed, you’re way more organized than I am in terms of getting in quicker to do this and that. What’s your bandwidth like right now? Because I think if you can do this thing, that would help me do that thing, and then the two of us would have a much better day. But let’s talk about it,” because getting them to opt into doing the thing is always better.

Jeff Armour
That being said, I think there’s enough understanding and trust in the tank right now that if I was like, “Hey, can you send me those things, and can you do this and this,” people would be like, “100%,” right? Because they know it’s not just because I’m randomly doing whatever. So there’s the two sides of it. It’s like them opting into it but also then building the trust that you’re not asking them to do something that is just, you know, flippant, I guess, is the word. That comes from, like, following up and saying, “Hey, I know I asked you really quickly about putting it in there. Thank you so much because I was running that meeting, and when I got there, I could just open it up and it was there, and it made me better prepared. So I appreciate it.”

Sam Demma
That’s amazing, Jeff. I love this whole conversation. I think we could go on for hours, but I want to respect your time. Thank you so much for your wisdom, your vulnerability, and just sharing your thoughts on leadership, delegation, and the culture you’ve built at the USC. It’s inspiring. I can’t wait to share this conversation with others, and I look forward to doing it again. Maybe we’ll have a yearly tradition.

Jeff Armour
Thanks so much, Sam. It’s always a pleasure to chat. These conversations challenge my thinking a little bit because sometimes I don’t know why I do things, but I love what I do, and I love making a difference in other people’s lives through sort of giving bits of myself and the opportunity for them to be the best selves that they can be. It’s super rewarding.

Sam Demma
Well, you’re doing it, so keep it up.

Jeff Armour
Thanks.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Jeff Armour

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

January 2, 2025 by Chief Operating Officer Education 0

Kristan McTernan – Vice Principal at the Toronto Catholic District School

Kristan McTernan – Vice Principal at the Toronto Catholic District School
About Kristan McTernan

Kristan McTernan is a Vice Principal with the Toronto Catholic District School. Prior to becoming a vice principal, she was a teacher for over a decade specializing in teaching English, Special Education and ESL. Highlights of her teaching career include leading the team that won a 2022 TCDSB Exemplary Practice Award for expanding the House System and establishing a mentorship program at Brebeuf College School. In the same year, she was awarded the Toronto Secondary Unit’s Status of Women Committee Exceptional Teacher Award for her efforts both inside and outside the classroom. Forming relationships with staff and students through various extracurricular activities, from coaching swimming, and moderating Student Council to organizing Grade 9 Orientation and Grade 12 Graduation make up some of the most memorable experiences of her teaching career.  As a high school administrator, Kristan is passionate about supporting all students by thinking creatively about “outside the bell”  solutions to address challenges to student success. She credits her willingness to think “outside the bell” with the fact that all her experiences in high schools thus far have been in specialized learning environments. Not only is she a Mary Ward Catholic Secondary School Centre for Self-Directed Learning alum, but she also taught at Brebeuf College, a single-gendered all-boys school, and is now a vice principal at Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts.  Throughout her career, Kristan has developed a passion for equity in education, with a focus on BIPOC representation in leadership. She is currently a mentor and one of the committee members of the TCDSB’s Racialized Administrators Mentorship Program. The goal of the program is to provide information, guidance and mentorship to BIPOC educators who may be interested in becoming an administrator. At both the board and school level, she continues to share her experiences as a black woman, black educator and immigrant to Canada proudly raised in Scarborough to further the positive impact of the TCDSB’s robust Equity Plan on the lives of students and their families.   Outside of school, Kristan is a proud mother of two boys aged 7 and 10. She raises her sons with her husband who is also a TCDSB administrator, which makes for colourful discussions at the dinner table. Formula 1 Racing rounds out the top three things Kristan is passionate about, just below her family and her school community.

Connect with Kristan McTernan: Email

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

Toronto Catholic District School
Mary Ward Catholic Secondary School Centre
Brebeuf College
Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts

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 Demma. And today we’re joined with a very special guest. Kristan Mcternan is a vice principal with the Toronto Catholic District School Board. She and I met less than a year ago, collaborating on an event. And I’m so honored to have her on the show today.

Sam Demma
Kristan, please take a moment to introduce yourself.

Kristan McTernan
Yeah, so that’s pretty much me in a nutshell right there. I’m Vice Principal of the Toronto Catholic District School Board. I have the pleasure of being the Vice Principal of Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts. I have been a Vice Principal for about two years, going into my third year. Before that, I was a teacher at Braybuff College for 14 and a half glorious years. And so, yeah, now I come to Cardinal Carter as a vice principal and just embracing what this role brings.

Sam Demma
Did you know you wanted to work in education, or what did your own pathway look like as a student?

Kristan McTernan
Education, yeah, I knew because I think it was in my blood. The path really started with my parents. Both my parents are educators. My dad retired. My mom is still a special education teacher. But when we moved here from Trinidad when I was five, I really watched them fight to get back to the classroom. They needed to get recertified and get some things in order, and that took a while. While they were working and transitioning into being Canadian citizens with two young children, they were also studying and getting themselves certified. I saw that passion they had for teaching, and when they finally got back into the classroom, it really resonated with me.

In the meantime, I was that kid who would line up all my teddy bears, give them little handouts, and decorate a wall in my room as a bulletin board. I’d change it up every so often to reflect themes or different seasons because I really wanted to emulate my parents and their love for education. That carried me to high school, where I had great teachers in both elementary and high school. At Holy Spirit in Scarborough, I was a student from JK to grade eight, and then I went to Mary Ward, which gave me a unique perspective on education because it’s a self-directed learning center.

Kristan McTernan
And while I was doing that, I got involved in working with Toronto Parks and Recreation, now called Toronto Parks, Recreation, and Culture, in the camps. That sparked it for me. I knew I wanted to be a teacher as soon as I got there. Before, I felt it, but when I started working with kids through camps, working my way up from an assistant leader to an area coordinator managing a group of camps, I fell in love. So, when I went to university, I took a psychology course, focusing on education. I did a double major in English and Criminology and a minor in History. I thought for a hot second that maybe I wanted to do law.

Kristan McTernan
But a teacher told me, “You want to work with youth. Do you want to work with them after they’re in the system, or do you want to reach them before they enter the system?” I said, “No, I want to work with them before.” And that was it. I did Teachers College and all the good things that led to this point. So, yeah, I think it was in my blood, starting with my parents.

Sam Demma
Cardinal Carter has one of the best art programs and facilities in the board. Is there a connection to arts in your own life that inspired you to be at this school, or was it luck of the draw that you ended up here?

Kristan McTernan
Well, it’s luck of the draw. Even though I had a brief foray as a saxophonist in elementary and high school, I wouldn’t say I have a musical background or a background in the arts. That allows me to be the biggest fangirl of all the arts in our school. I’m loving the drama, music, dance, and visual arts. I’m loving all of it. I can just be an amazing fan for the students because I don’t come to it with my own background in the arts.

Sam Demma
I was blown away by the amount of student art on the walls and just the energy of the students. It was such a welcoming space. What are the values that you and your team and the staff try to instill in the students? What is the culture you’re striving to build? Because it’s very apparent that when you walk in, it has a really welcoming feeling.

Kristan McTernan
Oh, it’s amazing to know that it’s coming across to visitors in our school. We are very much working with artists, and as a staff, we’ve talked a lot about the unique struggles for students who are artists, who have this creative mindset. Instead of focusing on expectations and being creative, they already come with that. What we strive to do is help them have balance—to celebrate their successes, to understand that failure is only part of the journey, and to provide them with a counter perspective than what they come with.

Kristan McTernan
That’s what we do at our school—to build community among the different art areas and bring students together across the art areas to embrace the experience of being a student. Balance in life, mental health, and well-being are just as important as creativity and being the best you can be. Our students tend to come with that, and we just provide the other perspectives to help them live a really balanced life and be their own best selves.

Sam Demma
When it comes to building connections or relationships with students, building rapport, how do you go about doing that as an adult?

Kristan McTernan
Once, when I was a teacher, someone came to me and said, “You have this way of joking around, but you’re not messing around.” I’ve tried to embody that. I want students to see me as a person, someone who cares about them first and foremost. Yes, there are things I need to enforce, but beyond all that, I care about their growth. I’m willing to break down my own walls, share my own experiences, and even share my own mistakes with them.

Kristan McTernan
I tell them, “I’ve been a student longer than I’ve been a teacher or an educator. I’m telling you this because I want the best for you.” When students see that, it’s the easiest way to build that relationship because they know I’m genuine. They’re willing to share their successes and fears, struggles and triumphs. That’s been the key to building those relationships as a teacher and now as a vice principal.

Sam Demma
That phrase, “I’m joking around, but I’m not messing around”—that’s gold right there.

Kristan McTernan
Well, I have to give credit to the person who said it first. His name’s Dave. Early in my career, he said that, and I ran with it.

Sam Demma
When you think about interactions you have with young people that have left them better than you found them, do any stories of impact come to mind? I ask because a lot of educators got into this field to make a difference, but sometimes they don’t hear about their impact until years later when a student bumps into them at the grocery store and says, “Miss, you changed my life.”

Kristan McTernan
I see it every day. At any given moment, I have students who need me. Even their growth from when I got to the school to now has been amazing. For example, attendance is a big piece. When a student says, “Miss, I didn’t skip today,” that’s a badge of honor. And I’m like, “Yes, amazing!” Celebrating those accomplishments with them is huge.

Kristan McTernan
As a teacher, I’ve had impactful moments too. I had a student who sent me pictures of his newborn son. When students come back and want to interact with you in their adult life, you know you’ve done something right. Those are the moments I carry with me—every time a student comes back to visit and tells me what’s happening in their in their lives is amazing.

Sam Demma
Who have been some of the impactful mentors in your own life or people that support you as a vice principal, as a teacher, that without them, you know, you think, gosh, life or the way I approach things would have been very different.

Kristan McTernan
I have, I’m like going, thinking about my journey of getting to education, I can name them as we go from stage to stage. As I said, my parents, first and foremost, and see, like, I would say, my mom is one of the most incredible educators I’ve ever met. I’ve seen kids that have been written off and my mom’s like, in her Trinidadian accent, no, we’re gonna work with this kid today, like that is happening.

That persistent attitude, that determination that no kid is going to be left behind, and every kid is worthy of growth and accomplishment, I get from her. When I was in elementary school, I had two amazing teachers, Ms. Bailey and Ms. Kudo, who showed me what it was for a teacher to care about a kid outside of the classroom.

When my parents dropped me off early in the morning, and it was really cold—we’re from Trinidad, I wasn’t used to this—Ms. Bailey took me to her class and allowed me to stay there. She would help me with my work. She had high standards, but she was willing to help me reach them and to care about me and my family.

She actually was a person I turned to when I was becoming a teacher to help me with the interview process and all that. She’s never given up on me. At Mary Ward, we have something called a teacher advisor. They are a teacher who actually doesn’t teach you—or they may teach you, but they don’t have to—that sees you every single day of your high school career. They see you in the morning, at lunch, and in the afternoon, tracking your progress and talking with your parents.

For me, it was Miss Earl. She was an amazing example of how a teacher goes beyond curriculum. A teacher cares about kids. She cared about me and kept me on the straight and narrow. My mom did it at home, and I knew Miss Earl would do it at school.

I also had a teacher named Mr. Wetzel who taught me that teaching is about helping students see the curriculum and engage in it beyond just the right answer. It was about what I could prove was the right answer, and that’s why I got into English.

Right now, I have a current mentor, my principal, Linton Soares. Yes, you met him when you came over. He’s a great mentor. He’s helping me take those values I had as a teacher, align them with his values, and bring that forward into this role. He helps me stay true to why I got into this in the first place, so it doesn’t get lost in the everyday tasks of running a school.

Sam Demma
It’s awesome that you can name these people one by one based on the stages of your life. I’m fortunate that I’ve had so many mentors myself, and I think about it all the time, like, thank God for putting these people in my life because they all seem to come at the perfect times when I needed them most.

We met in the most weird, coincidental ways. And I just know that if I didn’t have those people, my own values and the way I show up and the decisions I made would have likely been very different. So it’s nice to pay homage to some of those people. And if they listen to this, y’all just know that Kristan and I appreciate you big time.

Sam Demma
The start of the school year is no joke for a lot of educators because they just finished this two-month break. They’re excited, but sometimes they jump in, and it’s like, whoa, super overwhelming—there’s so much going on. How do you make that transition every year from summertime to another school year?

Is there any rituals that you have? Or like, you know, as a soccer player, I would always have these pregame routines, and I feel like the last week of August is pregame. What does your pregame look like?

Kristan McTernan
My pregame looks like first hanging on to every minute of the summer that I can before I have to let go. Just savoring every single minute of it so that I know when it’s time to get back into it, I’m ready. I think of it as Happy New Year.

Everybody celebrates January 1st, but Happy New Year for educators is the Tuesday after Labor Day. That comes with resolutions: self-reflection, what do I want to do differently this year? What were my successes last year? What do I need to do differently? What do I need to put in place to make that happen?

Every year, I go into it with the goal of finishing the way I started, finishing with the energy and perspectives I had at the beginning. Whatever I put in place to revise my practices leads to an even more successful outcome.

The job can be very draining—we put so much of ourselves into it. So, I want to create balance and be effective. My resolutions are often about that. I know my weaknesses, like organization. Sometimes I have to fake it till I make it, and it usually involves a lot of Amazon purchases, like a new agenda book. I can’t take my old habits into the new year!

A few new wardrobe pieces also help me feel ready to tackle a new year. I want to make sure that by the end of the year, I’ve done everything I set out to accomplish and made the most of the time with my family.

Sam Demma
I think that’s such a key reminder to be present wherever you are. Jim Rohn, a speaker who’s been very influential for me, said, “When you work, work. When you play, play. Don’t be at the beach thinking about work, and don’t be at work thinking about the beach.”

You ruin both experiences that way. When you’re at the beach, be at the beach. When you’re at work, be at work. That’s the sentiment you just shared. It’s something I need to hear right now because I’m always living in the future or thinking about the past, forgetting about the moment we have—right now.

Kristan McTernan
Exactly. There are only a finite number of summer days in my life, but there are also only a finite number of days in my career. So, I’m going to maximize all of it for what it is.

Sam Demma
Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today.

Kristan McTernan
Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast!

Sam Demma
I hope the academic year this year is phenomenal, and I look forward to crossing paths again soon.

Kristan McTernan
Thank you so much.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Kristan McTernan

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

December 31, 2024 by Administrative Support Education Educator Principals Student Leadership Student Success 0

Michelle Jarvis – Teacher at Morrin School

Michelle Jarvis – Teacher at Morrin School
About Michelle Jarvis

Michelle Jarvis’s story begins in the small, rural community of Morrin, AB where she was born and raised. From her earliest memories, Morrin School was more than just a place of learning; it was a cornerstone of Michelle’s childhood. Michelle was a student in Morrin School for her K-12 schooling, moving through the grades with the help of dedicated teachers who nurtured her curiosity and encouraged her dreams.

Growing up, Michelle was the kind of student who thrived on the excitement of learning new things. These experiences planted the seeds of Michelle’s own desire to become an educator, and Morrin School was the backdrop of her formative years.

In 2005, after Michelle earned her teaching degrees and gained some experience in other schools, she felt a pull to return to her roots. The opportunity to teach at Morrin School was a dream come true. 

Michelle’s journey as an educator at Morrin School began with teaching grade one. It was a delight to witness the unfiltered enthusiasm and wonder of young children as they embarked on their educational journey. Over the years, Michelle has taught every grade from kindergarten through tenth, each level presenting its own unique challenges and rewards. Whether it was helping a kindergartener learn to read or guiding a high school student through choices that will impact their futures, every moment was a chance to make a difference.

Being deeply rooted in Morrin, Michelle understands that education extends beyond the classroom. She is committed to not only fostering academic growth but also to strengthening the ties between the school and the community. Over the years, Michelle has been actively involved in organizing and participating in various community events. From being an executive member of the Local ATA, Morrin Figure Skating Club, volunteer for Homecoming, to leading the after-school enrichment programs, Michelle’s role as a teacher has always intertwined with her passion for community service.

One of the most rewarding aspects of her career has been witnessing the growth and achievements of her students. Each year, as Michelle sees the development of students’ skills and confidence, she is reminded of the profound impact that education can have. Michelle cherishes the moments when a student who struggled with a concept suddenly grasps it, or when a hesitant young learner gains the courage to speak up in class.

In the end, teaching is about more than just imparting knowledge; it’s about building relationships, fostering a love for learning and helping each student realize their full potential. Michelle is honored to be a part of her student’s educational journey, and she looks forward to many more years of learning, teaching, and growing with the wonderful community of Morrin School.

Connect with Michelle Jarvis: Email

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

Morrin School
Alberta Teachers’ Association

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 Demma. And today I am joined by a good friend, Michelle Jarvis, who I met a few years ago and then had the pleasure of visiting her community at Morin School, whose t-shirt I now proudly wear while training for marathons. Michelle.

Michelle Jarvis
You recognize it.

Michelle Jarvis
Hi.

Sam Demma
Take a moment to introduce yourself. Hi, everyone.

Michelle Jarvis
I’m Michelle. I’ve been at this teaching gig for 26 years now and yeah, we saw Sam at a conference and wanted him to come share his info with our students. So, we came to the little town of Mourne, and we all see when you wear our school shirt proudly when you’re working out in training. We love it.

Sam Demma
One of your students, I remember when I came, gave me a chain to wear while I was speaking and I wore his necklace.

Michelle Jarvis
Yes, yeah.

Sam Demma
And the taco lunch was a big highlight after we finished too.

Michelle Jarvis
It was great. Yeah, the students still talk about that day. It was awesome.

Sam Demma
26 years ago, did you know that you were going to get into teaching or like, how did you find this vocation?

Michelle Jarvis
Since I was a little kid, my mom had one of those memory books, you know, you put your school report card in and what you want to be when you grow up. I always said teacher. There’s other things on there, but teacher was always something I wanted to do. And I had teachers that I loved. I’m like, I want to be just like them. So that’s kind of where it came.

Sam Demma
After that realization, what did your path as a student and into an early professional look like?

Michelle Jarvis
As a student, I just tried to mainstream my courses for university or whatever I needed. And then I applied and got in, and just right from the get-go, I was like, I’m doing this. And I was so excited when I got into education. I volunteered and did different things for the community, working with students and youth. I picked up summer jobs like Summer Fund or working at a teen center and just hanging out with students and trying to build relationships that I thought would benefit me with my teaching career. And then, yeah, I went to the university and got my degrees.

Sam Demma
That’s awesome. And after the university experience ended, did you come straight back to this community? Or where did you go?

Michelle Jarvis
I was hoping to come straight back. But the principal here, he was my principal at the time too, when I was in high school, he’s like, “You know what, you need to go somewhere else, experience different places.” So, no, I went to Northern Alberta to an amazing Mennonite community. There were a lot of First Nations up there also. I stayed there for seven years and then I moved back and just slowly started substitute teaching and doing some work at the school here until a position opened up and I applied and got it.

Sam Demma
That’s so cool. What was different about school in that community versus the school you’re at now?

Michelle Jarvis
Not too much because they’re both smaller communities. The Mennonites, they were just an amazing group of people. They have a very strong faith base and strong community, like togetherness, building things and doing stuff for the school, the churches, and just the town itself. So I guess the difference would be the faith-based community because I’m in a public school here now. They were just, they’re amazing. You just, if you needed anything or if there was some event, they’d try and include you in it and bring you into the community activities.

Sam Demma
And it’s just very closely knit, I guess. That’s awesome. When you did come back here, did kids start pointing at your graduation photo on the wall?

Michelle Jarvis
Yes.

Sam Demma
Wow, that was you?

Michelle Jarvis
Yeah, they did. It’s really cool. We just moved into this new school, which you presented in. But in the old school, we had less glass with a lot of walls, and they had all the grad photos up from all the years. My mom and dad’s grad photos were in there and then myself and my siblings, and we loved it. We don’t have room for them here, but we downloaded them and we put them on the TV that we have in the school so students can still see them. They asked grades, and they were like, “You graduated when?”

Michelle Jarvis
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Sam Demma
When I arrived at the school for the performance, I remember walking into the office and there was a picture of six students on the wall. I was like, “Oh, are these your kids?” And the principal was like, “No, no, that’s our graduating class.” And I was like, “That’s awesome.” I think there’s such a unique thing that happens in smaller communities where the connections you make with kids are just that much deeper because you know their parents, their grandparents, where they shop. Everyone knows each other. What are some of the things you love about small tight-knit communities like the one you’re teaching in now?

Michelle Jarvis
Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I like the small communities. I did some practicums in the cities, which is great, but because I grew up here, I think I’m just more comfortable. I guess the thing is, yeah, you know generations of families, you know, like their grandparents and their aunts and uncles, and you just have that relationship of family, even though you might not be related, blood-related. It’s just these deep roots, I guess, and the whole time going by and deep roots and connections that I really enjoy.

Sam Demma
That’s awesome. And you also attended school at this school, which is super unique. I think it’s awesome that you’re serving the same school that served you growing up.

Michelle Jarvis
Kindergarten to grade 12.

Sam Demma
That’s awesome.

Sam Demma
When you think about teachers you had that were super inspiring or made a big contribution in your development, who comes to mind and what did those people specifically do that made such a big impact?

Michelle Jarvis
I had great teachers. There wasn’t any that I, you know, sometimes you have favorites or whatever. I did enjoy all my teachers. Things that stuck out with some, like Mrs. Vahidi, she was our grade three teacher and she made memorizing multiplications a thing, and we had to do it in 15 seconds and rattle them off and just made it games. And then after junior high and high school, just they cared. They wanted you to do well. So if you weren’t or you were struggling, they were like, “What can I do to help? Where are you?” You know, they just reached out and being smaller classes, they had that time and the ability to do that. So just things like that, and they made it fun, project-based things, different. Our biology teacher did a huge bio project. You had to choose something – the study of the meadows and plants and life that lived there. Another couple in our class did one; they did a pig dissection because one of the pigs had died. So they rebuilt the whole skeletal system. Just really cool things like that, that we were able to do.

Sam Demma
It sounds like experiential learning was a big part of it.

Michelle Jarvis
Yeah, definitely.

Sam Demma
When you think about students you’re serving today in your school, how do you go about trying to build rapport and relationships with young people?

Michelle Jarvis
My son would be embarrassed, but I try to get up on all their knowledge in slang and use it. Totally embarrasses them. I also try to do project-based stuff or learn what the students like or the way they like to learn. I know like, you know, note-taking is not really a thing anymore, or lecturing. It’s like, okay, how can we get into this deep thought? And I try to relate it to real-life situations. Like, you know, often as a student in math class, it’s like, “When are we ever going to use this, Mr. Haslam?” And he’d be like, “You just gotta do it.” So, when I get asked that, I’m like, “Okay, let’s see, when will we use this?” We try to relate it back to real-life situations where, yeah, you actually may need this someday.

Sam Demma
That’s a good strategy.

Sam Demma
I was the same student asking those questions to my teachers, and I think that extra step reinforces in a student’s mind that this matters and that you care as their teacher. And I just had some teachers that were so passionate. They could have been teaching me about anything, and I would have been locked in because I was just overwhelmed by how passionate they were about what they were teaching. They could have been teaching us about paint drying, and I would have been like, “Whoa, this is amazing.”

Michelle Jarvis
Yeah, you can tell when it’s something they love, right? Like, there are certain units I teach that I really like, so they can tell because I’m excited, like body language and just everything. Yeah, you’re right. There’s those teachers that resonate with you because it’s like, yeah, you could definitely make anything exciting.

Sam Demma
Now, a lot of teachers at this time of year are excited because the school year is starting, but also overwhelmed because you’re coming out of the break of the summertime. This may be a tough time in your life based on things that are happening outside of the school. How do you get through those challenging moments as an educator?

Michelle Jarvis
Myself personally, we have a great staff, and I know there’s people I can talk to, even our men team. I can go and talk to them about things like that. So, yeah, when you’re just kind of stressed out or feeling burnt out because it’s so overwhelming – the excitement of coming back and, like you said, you’re off a break and that – but it’s also “whoosh,” here’s all this work now. Yeah, I’m very fortunate. All the schools I’ve ever worked at, the staff and the administrators have been phenomenal, and I’ve been grateful that I have those people and those supports that I can reach out to. They understand, and they’ll either listen or give me some resources or things that might help me in those times.

Sam Demma
That’s awesome that you have that support system.

Michelle Jarvis
It is.

Sam Demma
Outside of your experiences as a teacher, you’ve been involved in the community, and you’ve been involved in coaching, volunteering, and with teacher associations and conferences. Where does this never-ending energy come from?

Michelle Jarvis
Oh, there are days I’m a zombie, but I don’t know. It’s just, it’s a passion of mine. I love it. I love being a part of the community and the school. And it kind of feels like being a rock star. I went to Homecoming last year, and I ran an alumni volleyball tournament at the school. All the past students that I had came back, and people were like, “Wow.” They’re just so excited to see you, and I’m like, “No, I’m excited to see them too.” I don’t know. It’s just there. It’s just something in my heart, the passion about it. And, yeah, even when you’re tired, though, you just push through it because you know the benefits and the outcome are just so rewarding – to see them and to see the students succeed and grow up. And they come back and visit, and it’s amazing.

Sam Demma
When I talk to educators, I ask them why they got into this work, and most of them tell me they want to make a difference. They really want to support and amplify young people. Can you think of a student who was really struggling before you started teaching them, or even just someone you noticed? And through their experiences in school and in extracurricular activities, you saw them make a really big improvement. You can change their name if it’s a serious story, but the reason I bring it up is because I think a lot of educators forget how much of an impact they’re having on young people. And sometimes that young person doesn’t come and tell them right away. So hearing stories like these ones just remind them why they’re doing this work in the first place.

Michelle Jarvis
There are a few students that come to mind. I guess one is just struggle – came from a tough home, not, you know, just kind of didn’t have a high economic status. Maybe both parents had to work a lot of jobs. The kids came to school with what they could to eat. They liked to hunt and do different things to help provide for their family. School wasn’t his favorite thing, of course, but he got through it. He worked really hard, got his grades, and was able to graduate. After, like two or three years later, I ran into him at my niece’s graduation in another town. And I’m like, “Oh, hey, what are you doing here?” And he’s like, “Oh, I’m friends with this graduate.” And I’m like, “Oh, it’s great.” And he’s like, “You know, I gotta tell you, you made a difference in my life. You’re the reason I actually graduated and finished school, and I’ve gone on and done really well for myself.”

Michelle Jarvis
And teachers often don’t realize sometimes the impact we’re having on students. And I said, “Well, what did I do?” And he’s like, “You were just there, you listened, you tried to build relationships and connect with me. I don’t think you’re a big hunter, but you would ask me, like, ‘Oh, how did hunting go this weekend? What did you get? How many geese? Or did you get your deer or your moose or whatever?’ And you just always encouraged us to follow something, our dreams or something that we were passionate about.” And he’s like, “And I’ve done that.”

Now I haven’t talked to him in quite a few years, but I know he was working as a hunting guide. Visitors would come from the United States or different parts of Canada and come out here, and he would guide them, show them where to go, and get permission from the landowners. I didn’t realize sometimes that we, as teachers, impacted students in those ways. They don’t often always come back, but he just, despite some of the challenges in his life and growing up, continued on. He finished school, and he went on, and he’s successful and contributing to the community.

Sam Demma
That’s so awesome.

Michelle Jarvis
Yeah.

Sam Demma
It’s funny how sometimes we don’t even recognize we’re making the difference.

Michelle Jarvis
Exactly. Yeah. Sometimes it’s just even talking to them or saying hi. One principal we had said, “Okay, every morning, I want you to connect with certain kids.” So we kind of did like a hockey pool draft, and I’m like, “Okay, these are my kids.” We’d say hello to all of them, but I’d focus on these ones – just make sure they’re okay and check in with them. And it was great because then we got to see them, and they got to see us outside of just the classroom. Just saying, “Hey, Sam, how you doing today? How is your mom or dad?” Just, like, on a personal level – even two minutes every day – just kind of checking in on them and reaching out.

Sam Demma
I remember a time in my life where I was really struggling. I had just started my career as a speaker and convinced my parents that it was a good decision to put my post-secondary education on hold to give this a go. I hired a coach because if I wasn’t investing in the formal education path, I told myself I was going to invest in education. I found a gentleman who was 25 years ahead of me, who had been speaking for 20-plus years. Then COVID hit. I had 30 presentations canceled, and I was bawling my eyes out, sitting on this hill near my house.

I called him – his name’s Chris – and I said, “Chris, this is the worst decision I’ve ever made. I can’t work with you anymore. I should be back in school.” And, you know, the whole 40 minutes, this guy barely said anything. He just listened. By the end of the phone call, I felt like all my problems were solved, and he didn’t even really say anything. It made me realize that sometimes people aren’t actually looking for us to solve their problems; they’re just looking for us to listen. They’re looking for us to be there.

So when someone’s struggling and they start telling me about their struggles, I’ll try to remind myself to ask them, “Hey, are you looking for a solution, or do you just want me to be an ear?” I feel like 90% of the time, they just want you to be there and hear them out. Despite the fact that you’re not a hunter, you took interest in that young man’s passions. I think there’s nothing more impactful that we can do when talking to young people than to care about the things they care about.

Michelle Jarvis
And they teach us, too. There’s another student that’s into football, and I’ve watched football, but not a lot. I just ask, “Hey, how was the game on the weekend?” He’ll tell me what position he plays, and I learn something from them also daily. I agree with you – just listening sometimes to the person. Even myself, like you said, at the beginning of the year, we’re overwhelmed. I’ll go talk to my coworker, and she’ll just listen. Then, after, I’m like, “Oh, thanks, I feel better.” She’s like, “You’re welcome.”

Sam Demma
That’s awesome. When you think about conferences you’ve attended or events you’ve been to, which ones stick out in your mind that had a big impact on building community and also taking back some important lessons to bring to the school?

Michelle Jarvis
When I was in university, we did a leadership conference in education. I was part of the planning committee, and we just brought in these speakers. It was exciting to see it from that side as an organizer and see how much it takes and the organization required. But when it all came together, it was just an awesome experience.

Of course, when I saw you and Savio at the Middle Years Conference, I was like, “This is something that’s fun and entertaining, but also connects to real-life situations that everyone deals with.” Another one, I think you’ve met her – Dr. Jody Carrington. I know she’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but she’s down-to-earth, and she says it like it is. That was another one. And Shelly Moore is another person that resonated with me. She struggled through school, and we just had her again the other day.

She’s there for those students who struggle. She says, “Hey, school isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay. But while you have to be here, we’re going to make sure you succeed. We’re going to make accommodations. We’re going to find your strengths, and we’re going to focus on those, not on the areas where you may struggle, because you’re great just the way you are, and you have things to contribute to us, too.”

Sam Demma
That’s awesome.

Michelle Jarvis
Yeah, those are the people that resonate with me. I always want to attend their conferences or hear their speeches again.

Sam Demma
When you think about educators that may be struggling right now, if you could give them a word of advice, what would you share with them?

Michelle Jarvis
It gets better. Sometimes it just feels like it’s never-ending, but remember why you started. Yes, the paperwork, the files, the IPPs, and all these new systems for report cards are part of it. But remember why you started. You started because you love kids, you want to help them follow their dreams, and we’re here for them, not necessarily for all the administrative stuff.

So always refocus on that. Yes, that’s just part of our job, but what’s the reason we chose to do this job? That always helps me. I think, “I’m here for the students, and I want to be a good role model for them. I want to make this experience, from kindergarten to grade 12, a safe place where they feel comfortable and know I’m approachable.”

Sam Demma
Michelle, thank you so much for taking some time to come on the show, talk about your educational journey, your philosophies around building relationships with young people, the importance of listening, and the advice you’d share with someone who’s not feeling the greatest in the vocation right now. I hope you continue to find meaning in the work you’re doing and make a big contribution. I look forward to crossing paths with you again very soon.

Michelle Jarvis
Thank you for having me. Yes, I hope I can continue to do this for a few more years because I do love it and I love the relationships I build. So thanks for having me.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Michelle Jarvis

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

December 26, 2024 by Education Educator Student Leadership Student Success Teachers Uncategorized 0

Natalie Fisher – Manager of Student Services at the Mohawk Students’ Association (MSA) at Mohawk College

Natalie Fisher – Manager of Student Services at the Mohawk Students’ Association (MSA) at Mohawk College
About Natalie Fisher

Natalie Fisher is the Manager of Student Services at the Mohawk Students’ Association (MSA) at Mohawk College, where she has dedicated the last seven years of her career. For the past two years, she has taken on the pivotal role of Manager, where she focuses on fostering student success and well-being within a diverse community. As a proud Mohawk alumnus and former member of the varsity women’s basketball team, Natalie brings a unique perspective to her role. Through her commitment to providing essential and barrier-free services, Natalie significantly enhances the college experience for students every day.

Recognized for her contributions, Natalie was nominated for the 2019 Women of Distinction Award by the YWCA – Hamilton, highlighting her impact and leadership in the community.

Outside of her professional responsibilities, Natalie passionately volunteers as a basketball coach for the Special Olympics in West Niagara, a role she has embraced for over eight years. Her dedication to both her work and volunteer efforts exemplifies her commitment to making a positive difference in the lives of others.

Connect with Natalie Fisher: Email | Instagram | Linkedin | Facebook

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

Mohawk Students’ Association (MSA)
Mohawk College
YWCA – Hamilton
Special Olympics in West Niagara

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 Demma. And today we are joined by a very special guest, a good friend, volleyball coach, Natalie Fisher.

Natalie Fisher
Hey, what’s going on?

Sam Demma
Nat, thanks so much for coming on the show. Please take a moment to introduce yourself.

Natalie Fisher
Hey, I’m Natalie Fisher. I am the manager of student services at the Mohawk Student Association at Mohawk College.

Sam Demma
You’ve been there for how many years now? Seven. Seven years. And what got you involved or interested in serving young people and working in education?

Natalie Fisher
So I didn’t go to school. I feel like I’ve been at Mohawk my whole life. I went to school here. I took two programs. So I feel like this is my second home. But I really just wanted to make a difference, make an impact on students’ lives. So I worked as a student here on the campus and then I kind of worked my way once I graduated up into the role I have today, whether it was at a satellite campus or here at the main campus and then obviously in different roles but in student services. So this is my passion.

Sam Demma
The college couldn’t get rid of you even if they wanted to.

Natalie Fisher
They really couldn’t. They really couldn’t. I was a student, I was an employee, and then I was a varsity athlete. So I kind of hit all the areas here. So yeah, they are probably sick of me at this point.

Sam Demma
When you were a high school student growing up, did you know you wanted to work in education? Or what was your career path that brought you here?

Natalie Fisher
Yeah, so when I was in high school, talking with the guidance counselor, I wanted to be a teacher at the beginning. So I guess kind of with young adults, but then I wanted to be a nurse. So in my first year out of high school, I actually took nursing. And I didn’t love it. I didn’t like, I don’t know, I was a varsity athlete. I was from a small town. Coming into Hamilton was a huge culture shock for me. So it was a rough first year of post-secondary.

But then I kind of made my path a different way. And I did health wellness and fitness and then I did occupation physiotherapy. So that’s kind of how I came to where I am. And then I found a job within the OTA program field, but I found myself working a part-time job so then I worked at the college and then it all came into fruition where I am now.

Sam Demma
That’s awesome.

Sam Demma
Did you have educators in your life or coaches that kind of shed a light on good mentorship for young people that inspired you to get into this? Or, tell me some of the role models in your life.

Natalie Fisher
Yeah, absolutely. I can think of one, like, at the top of my head. Her name is Kelly Denham. She was a basketball coach when I played here. She worked in the alumni department at the time, and she also coached basketball in the community. So she kind of really was a role model in my life in terms of like just giving back to people and making an impact on young girls in the community as well.

So she was probably my biggest role model once I hit the college era of my time. She unfortunately has passed away. She got cancer during COVID but she will always have a special place in my heart and I will always remember her life lessons that she showed me, whether it was on the court, going through resilience and adversity as an athlete, as a student-athlete, and then giving back to the community, working with other people.

She’s really probably why I am where I am today, just in terms of the mentorship that she gave me and the advice that she’s given me. So she is a huge part of where I am and why I am the person I am.

Sam Demma
Oh, I’m so sorry about the passing. And I appreciate you sharing. I can think of some of the mentors I’ve had in my life that have had a similar impact as the one you’re describing that Kelly’s had on you. What do you think it is that she did? Or how did she show up that it really helped you?

Natalie Fisher
I think she also, she put me first and I am also that type of person. She had a family, she had two kids, so she always would see me at practice and like see that I was dragging my butt, like I was tired, I was like not struggling with school, but it was a lot coming out of high school and for you to go from like high school from a small town to a bigger city and post-secondary, it can be overwhelming at times.

And I think that the constant support and the constant of her putting me first before herself and her family was a huge thing that I was so grateful for. She offered her couch at one point because it was a snowstorm and I lived 30 minutes away from campus. So those small little things really made me be so grateful of those things that other people do in life.

The smallest things that we do for other people or even in my job, she makes a huge difference in people’s lives, and I think that’s why I appreciated her so much. Because the little things made a huge difference at the time for me, and I just was so grateful.

Sam Demma
Can you think of a moment one of your colleagues today did something small for you that had a really big impact and maybe it was recently, maybe it was a long time ago but what examples stick out in your mind?

Natalie Fisher
Let me see. I think of one. Obviously, everybody’s got a lot going on—jobs, life, family. And I would say the last two years, my dad has been sick. So it’s been hard for me to watch him go through all of that and I have a daughter and work is busy. So I’ve just been run down a little bit, like only six months ago.

And I think April, one of my coworkers, just said like, “Hey Nat, let’s get off campus, let’s have lunch, like let’s connect on like a personal level.” And she’s fairly new to the organization so I was like, “Oh, like what a great gesture.” She notices that I’m not myself at work and we had lunch and we both had tears, we had laughs, like it was such a good connection.

And I think from that point on, our friendship and our co-working space together has grown tremendously. And I think now I have that person to count on at work if I am having that moment, because I’m comfortable. I’m in that safe space that she’s created.

Sam Demma
I think it’s also such an important thing to remember that we’re not alone in those challenges because everyone’s going through something. And yeah, I’m so sorry to hear about your dad. But it’s so cool to hear that you have those supports in your workplace. Like it’s not something you have to wait for until you go home.

How do you think you cultivate those safe spaces where people can be themselves?

Natalie Fisher
I think it’s just like the small actions, like, “Hey, how’s it going?” And I know, like, we always say, like, a little chit-chat doesn’t mean a lot to people, but I think, like, you genuinely can sense someone’s careness and their empathy that they have for a situation.

So they’re not really just saying, “Hey, how’s it going?” just because you’re passing by. Like they genuinely want to know how you’re doing. And I think if you have that space, more people will be vulnerable to open up. You’re like, “I’m not okay.” And I think that’s what we’re finding now here at the college is where students are okay, are getting more comfortable to say like, they’re not okay, which is a huge stepping stone, I think.

But I, yeah, and it is great that I have that space here at work. Not everybody has that. They usually go to work and go home, and then deal with kind of like their mental health or their inner kind of thoughts. So I am very fortunate.

Sam Demma
I think also when people in leadership positions express vulnerability first, it gives everyone else permission to do it because everyone else may be hesitating because they’re not sure if it’s acceptable behavior. But when someone in a leadership position does it in front of everybody, it almost like creates permission for everyone else to do the same.

Natalie Fisher
I agree.

Sam Demma
And I think like being a young leader in the role I am today, I can say all of my staff under me are older than me. So like, it’s a unique dynamic that I have between my staff. And I guess if I have shown them that I am not okay sometimes, so I think like it also gives them a safe space to be like, “Nat, I’m not okay either.”

I remember probably just before September hit for Startup, one of my staff was on edge and I had went down to her campus and I was like, “What’s up?” And I had created that safe space because she knew I have been in that space. So she did open up and she’s like, “I’m stressed. I don’t know why.”

And so like, we talked through it. And then by the end of the conversation, she’s like, “Nat, like, thank you so much for like, letting me like, be myself and be open and about how she was feeling.”

Sam Demma
That’s awesome. So it’s so, I’m glad to hear that you make the time for those conversations, because I think they’re just as important as work-related conversations.

A lot of your role is managing other staff on your team, but you also do a lot of student-facing events and you interact with students a lot. How do you build a relationship with a young person or build rapport with young people?

Natalie Fisher
I think it’s totally different. And I don’t know, you are young too. So, but when I was a student, I was very open with like co-workers—or not co-workers, like staff and faculty that always came up to me.

But I find this generation in post-secondary is a little bit tougher. Like, they make things a bit harder for us to kind of build that relationship with them. But I think if they are having a problem or an issue, I think just listening to them is the biggest thing. They want to be heard.

And then I think just providing that empathy is a huge part too. So like, “I hear you, I’m listening. Like, this is how we can support you. If I’m not the right person, like let’s connect you with the right person.”

Before pandemic was probably a little easier because right now at the college like people are at home, some staff are not on campus all the time. So as the MSAA we try to connect them with a person instead of just going, “Oh, just email this person,” which I think goes a long way for people, especially international students who are new to Canada and don’t know the environment here at the college yet.

So connecting them with a person, like person-to-person interaction is probably the best way. And then we’ve had students come back to say like, “Thank you so much for your help. Like, I’ve really got my things dealt with.” So they are appreciative of the extra step and extra mile that we go to make sure that their issues or concerns are dealt with.

Sam Demma
I had teachers who went above and beyond to make sure that I was okay or taken care of and it made all the difference for me. I also had some coaches who had a big impact on me for that same reason.

How has sports played a role in your journey and your leadership?

Natalie Fisher
Yeah, for sure. I think sport is a unique thing. It brings life lessons kind of after the fact. You don’t think about them when you’re playing. I don’t know about you, but I definitely didn’t think about things in the life side when I was playing.

But I think just going through adversity and injury is kind of the same thing when you have a difficult employee or a difficult situation that you’re dealing with. So not to get down on yourself, think about how you can do better after the situation’s over.

Practice makes perfect. Like I feel like you’re not gonna get it right when you’re dealing with a situation for the first time. And so like going through it, you’re gonna learn something and then you’re gonna go through it again and you’re gonna learn another thing.

So I think very similar lessons, I guess you could say, within sport that translates into like the real world. Another thing is like time management. When you’re a student athlete, you gotta time manage huge, right?

So like coming into like a leadership role, you have your staff, you have your own work, and then like you have the leadership side of things. So for me, I’ve been in the leadership role for two years now, and I confidently say, like I am learning every day on how to be better.

Sam Demma
I think it’s so important to hold that mindset no matter whether it’s a job or a sport or whatever you’re getting involved in. I think the moment you think you’ve arrived and you know everything is the moment you start the downfall.

Natalie Fisher
Exactly.

Sam Demma
So I love that. Sports for me, too, were massive in life lessons. I had a coach who really cared about our character as human beings as well, not just the athletics. And he had all these weird, well, at the time, what seemed like weird rules.

There was this long cobblestone pathway we had to walk down to get to the soccer field, but if you just walked off the pathway onto the grass you could get there in like two minutes less. Right? Because it was a perfect like straight line shortcut whereas this path went in a massive circle for no reason to bring you to the soccer field.

So first couple of times I joined this club I cut off the pathway and walked on grass and I get all the way to the field and I’m shaking the coach’s hands and he’s like, “Sam, go walk back up the hill and walk down the pathway.” And I was like, “Okay, coach, my bad.”

We always had our shirts tucked in, like he was very much attentive to these little details. And the way he carried himself just stuck with me. So I think we had similar experiences when it comes to sports.

One of the things that happens as an athlete is you also have uncomfortable conversations, right? You know, you gotta have uncomfortable conversations with a coach, with your teammates, even with your parents in the car, sometimes after the game finishes, right?

And they turn to you and say, “So how’d you think you played?” And you’re like, “It’s one of those ones, huh?”

Natalie Fisher
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Sam Demma
I think it’s the same working with other people, you know, as a part of a student association. As a team leader, as a team member, how do you approach those challenging conversations with your staff members?

Natalie Fisher
Yeah, I think it’s, again, like listening, like active listening. I know like some leaders just kind of like listen but aren’t attentive to what people are saying. I think listening, providing them that space to really open up—I think if they don’t have that space to open up, you’re not going to get their authentic feeling or self.

But I also then think like working together to create that solution or to get on the other side of the difficult piece. It’s really hard to bring something to someone or have something brought to you and then you figure out, as the leader, you figure out the solution. I think it’s important that you work together with that employee to figure out what is the best option for us to move forward over this obstacle.

It gives them a sense of belonging and value. I think the worst feeling is for them to walk away and go, “Well, they didn’t do anything,” or, “I don’t feel like that’s the right direction that they were expecting.” So I try to listen to their story. I always ask them, “What do you think that we should do to kind of improve the situation?” or, “What are your thoughts?” And then I can share my perspective.

So it’s like a team—two people or a team figuring out what the best course of action is. It just gives them a sense of, “We’ve listened, we now are on the same page, so we have shared understanding.” And then moving forward, we’ll work together, and they know that the support is there. So if it does come up again, or there’s another roadblock before we get to the other side, they’re confident that they have the support beside them.

Sam Demma
I think the active listening piece is so challenging because in today’s days we have so many distractions—not to mention our own challenges. Like, someone starts talking and we’re thinking about 4 p.m., and we have to deal with this person or go pick up our kids. So is there anything you do that helps with that portion of the conversation?

Natalie Fisher
So I try to make notes as they talk. And then usually what I’ll do is I’ll kind of paraphrase what they said or what I’m hearing. I’m like, “This is what I’m hearing. Is this accurate? If it’s not, where am I missing pieces?” Just so if I do have these random thoughts in my head, like you were saying, I can then correct myself.

And so it could be a huge piece of the story that they’re sharing that I’m missing. So I do try to reiterate, “This is what I’m hearing. This is what you’re saying. This is how you’re feeling. Is that correct? Is that accurate?” Obviously, if they say no, probably questions help, but usually, they’re like, “Yep, perfect.” So then we kind of move forward.

Sam Demma
And you’re listening to your staff every single day, but you’re also listening to the concerns of hundreds, if not thousands, of students, trying your best as a team to cater to those needs. You have a pulse on some of the challenges students at the college are facing.

What would you say are some of the most common things in terms of challenges that students these days are carrying in their backpacks?

Natalie Fisher
I would say as an international student, money and jobs are a huge thing. Housing, affordable housing nowadays, is really big, especially in Hamilton. And then what the MSA and the services department—we’ve been focused on food insecurity. Food insecurity has been a huge piece of the struggle students are facing these days.

So we’ve expanded all of our food security programs. We are going to facilitate a Health Canada survey on food insecurity to get some data on how food-insecure students are based on 10 standard questions. So we’re really looking forward to that. Unfortunately, it’s going to bring back bad data, but I think once we have that data, we can then improve the resources and stuff on campus for students.

And then advocate to the institution to say, “These are the percentages of how food insecure students are. What can you do as an institution to also support these students?” So I would say food insecurity, housing, and money, jobs are the huge struggles students face.

Sam Demma
I was a guest at Mohawk College last year, and I noticed that this year, the local restaurant had these reusable containers that you could bring back to have your food put in every time you buy food there. And I thought, “What a unique way to be a little more sustainable and also provide a less expensive option for students who are going to continue using that reusable container.”

What are some of the other changes that are happening at the college that you as MSA are pumped about, or things that you’ve been working on and you’re excited to just shout on top of mountains?

Natalie Fisher
Yeah, so it’s called Friendlier, the sustainable kind of reusable program. It launched in September, so it is campus-wide. It’s not just the MSA, which is nice, and I think a lot of other colleges are trying to get on board with this initiative.

Another one, we launched a program called Dialogue, as you’re familiar with. It is an uncapped mental health wellness service. So we piloted it last year, so we’re super excited that students get to use it this year. Again, because before, we had capped therapy, so they got six sessions for their mental health, which wasn’t ideal because most students need more than six sessions to kind of get to remission in their treatment.

So this is uncapped, it’s virtual, on their phone, so very accessible. Another one—this food security thing is really big from our board of directors that we’re trying to figure out what students want. As you know, things are changing in the generations of students.

They don’t want to drink and party anymore, is what we’re finding. They want to just hang out, have a social connection with one another. So we really pivoted from our event side to really focus on social connection and how to get other students to interact with another group of students without kind of making it awkward for them.

So that’s kind of what we pivoted to. We have a huge international population, so we’re trying to cater events to them. But I think most of our events that we’ve kind of been hyped up all summer about are now over. But we have kind of programming going out throughout the year.

So yeah, lots going on at the MSA. I think there’s different things that we have happening and are catering to different demographics at the college.

Sam Demma
If there’s an educator who’s just jumping into this work now, who’s feeling a little scared, nervous, burnt out, what advice would you give them?

Natalie Fisher
Hold on. I think everything’s changing. I think if you don’t love change, post-secondary is not the work for you. I can confidently say within the seven years that I’ve been here at the MSA, not one year has been the same.

I love change, so it’s kind of great to adapt different things. I had one leader tell me when there’s a change there’s always an opportunity for new things. So I think if you do come up against a roadblock or you’re burnt out, there’s always going to be an opportunity on the other side, and I think if you find that opportunity, that will relight your fire to get back into it.

Sam Demma
That’s exactly what I told myself when my car broke down. “This is a beautiful opportunity for a new vehicle.”

Natalie Fisher
There you go.

Sam Demma
Nat, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time and your positive energy and your insights. And I hope that the work with the MSA continues to be successful and very meaningful.

Natalie Fisher
Yeah, thanks so much, Sam. Happy to be here.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Natalie Fisher

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

December 24, 2024 by Coach Education Student Leadership Student Success 0

Stephen Hoyland – Assistant Superintendent Education Services at Battle River School Division

Stephen Hoyland – Assistant Superintendent Education Services at Battle River School Division
About Stephen Hoyland

Stephen Hoyland is the Assistant Superintendent -Education Services at Battle River School Division in Camrose, Alberta. Over his career, Stephen has taught Grades 4 to 12 ranging in subjects from Art, English, Social Studies and French.
Stephen was a school administrator for thirteen years. He took on the role of Director of Human Resources for three years and now is in his second year as Assistant Superintent – Education Services.

Throughout his career, Stephen has worked closely with students to promote their voice and ideas through student councils. Stephen believes that teachers succeed by listening to and learning from their students, as their voices shape meaningful impact in our schools. In order to make a difference in the lives of students and teachers, Stephen strives to be relationship focused, collaborative, energetic and hopeful.

Connect with Stephen Hoyland: Email | Instagram

Listen Now

Listen to the episode now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favourite podcast platform.

Resources Mentioned

Battle River School Division

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 Demma. Today we are joined by my friend, Stephen Hoyland. Stephen is the Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services with the Battle River School Division. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Stephen Hoyland
Oh, Sam, I’m so excited. Thanks for having me. It means a lot just to spend some time with you today.

Sam Demma
I’m so excited to chat with you. Did you know when you were a student yourself that one day you’d be working supporting staff and students?

Stephen Hoyland
You know, for when I was a kid, no. When I actually did become a teacher, a lot of my friends that I went to high school with, they couldn’t believe that I was the guy that actually became the teacher from the class. I knew, Sam, like I had some great teachers and that made some impact in me when I was young.

Stephen Hoyland
I remember I was in grade six and I was struggling with my spelling, and the teacher sent me to a remedial room, and I just remember how that felt—like I was being pulled out. The teacher in there, after about a week, he came up to me, and this wouldn’t be said now in a class, but he said, “Stephen, are you stupid?” And I—it was a shock. And I said, “Pardon?” He goes, “Like, honestly, are you stupid?” And I said, “No.” And he goes, “Exactly. Don’t ever, ever forget that. And I never want to see you back here.”

Stephen Hoyland
For me, that was one of those moments where I went, okay. I wasn’t expecting a teacher to say that. Like I said, a teacher would never say that now, but for me, it was pivotal. I saw somebody that believed that I could actually do what I needed to do. That was one of those moments where I went, okay, I can build on this, and I can have faith in myself. And yeah, in grade six, I really started to realize, hey, I can do this.

Stephen Hoyland
I had some teachers along the lines that really challenged me in high school and made me realize my potential. And so what I did, Sam, is I love challenges. When I finished high school, I came from a small town in Alberta where nobody spoke French, and I wanted to be bilingual. I just—I wanted to be bilingual.

Stephen Hoyland
I wanted to be able to be that Canadian that could speak French and English. So I enrolled in what was called the Faculty Saint-Jean through the University of Alberta. I took my degree there, and I did not know hardly any French. I was just someone that was supported by a lot of different people, whether they were from Quebec or Francois-Breton. They really helped me and made me realize that, okay, if I have a challenge, if I have a dream, there are going to be people there that can help me. And yeah, I became bilingual, and that really opened up many doors for me in my career.

Sam Demma
You said you love challenges. Was it always like that for you, or where did that come from?

Stephen Hoyland
Yeah, it has always been—I love challenges. Coming from a small town, knowing that post-secondary was the key to opening a lot of doors, I just knew that if I wanted to do something that was going to be enriching and bring me happiness, I needed to set goals. Setting the goal to become bilingual, even though I hardly knew any French—I took three years of French in high school—and deciding, okay, I want to become bilingual, immerse myself, go to Quebec, take university there, and travel the world. That mindset of creating new goals was huge for me.

Stephen Hoyland
When I became a teacher, I started thinking outside of the box. I began teaching new courses, courses I had absolutely no reference to, and learned from that. I just kept on pushing myself to do what I needed to do. Eventually, Sam, it came to going to different schools and being identified as, “Hey, are you interested in administration? We think you’d be a great fit.” I threw myself out there. One thing I said when I was young in my career was, “I love being a teacher. I don’t want to be an administrator.” Then I became an assistant principal—I loved it. After a while, I decided, “Okay, I’m going to become a principal.” During that time, I also pursued my master’s, which I said I never wanted to go back to university for. But I learned from that and kept setting those goals. That was important.

Sam Demma
How important do you think it is for young people to set goals? It sounds like it had a big impact on you.

Stephen Hoyland
You know, when you’re young—I mean middle school—you’re really enjoying your friends, your peer groups, and at that point, the goals aren’t at the forefront. But I really do believe that if you have a bit of an idea of what’s going to make you happy, what’s going to give you contentment in life, then focus on a goal at that age. Once you get into high school, I think this can be difficult for young people too. Often, family or neighbors are asking, “What are you going to do when you’re done school? What do you want to do?” That puts a lot of pressure on kids.

Stephen Hoyland
I think if kids have a bit of an idea of what they might like to do, that makes a big difference. Starting with a small goal, and then life experiences can really build upon that and direct you into something that’s going to bring you happiness.

Sam Demma
You’ve offered an insight into your own story of the goal you set. Typically, when we think about goals, we think about students’ career-path-related goals. But your goal was to learn French. You didn’t say, “I want to be a French teacher,” or “I want to teach a language in the future.” You said, “There’s a skill out there that I’m curious about, and I want to improve at it and learn.” And it opened doors for you. I think if we can encourage more young people to set goals related to their curiosities or just building skills, the building of a skill will open doors or pathways in the future.

Sam Demma
Most of the time, when you become proficient or good at something, you can add value—and we need people that can add value. And I still suck at French. So if I met your grade six teacher, he would probably be like, “Sam, are you stupid?”

Stephen Hoyland
Oh, and you know, yeah, and it’s—you’ve nailed it. It’s just about finding those things, those skill sets, that bring you that fulfillment and, at the same time, challenge you. Run with it and grow as a person.

Sam Demma
There’s a book that I was recently recommended by my godfather. I played golf with him and my dad recently, and he manages lots of people in his role. So I was asking him about leadership and managing others, and he told me to check out this book called Principles by Ray Dalio. He said it was foundational in the way he leads his teams.

Sam Demma
I was reading the book, and one of the statements stuck out to me. It said, “The success doesn’t come from achieving the goal; it comes from struggling well in the pursuit of the goal.” And I thought, you know, there are so many times in my life where I’ve reached the outcome that I thought was going to make me feel good. And when I hit the thing or achieve the quote-unquote goal, I actually felt kind of lost—like, because now I’m not struggling towards anything anymore.

Sam Demma
In your own journey, do you have any other goals? What are things that are causing you to struggle these days? What’s pulling Stephen forward?

Stephen Hoyland
Oh, that’s such a great question. In my role right now, Sam, I’m responsible for the learning that takes place in our school division. Over the last year, I’ve learned a lot about math and numeracy. As I said, I learned French and then became a humanities teacher. Now, in my new role, I am learning an awful lot around math and numeracy. I had to create some goals for myself last year.

Stephen Hoyland
One of them was to become more proficient at understanding what math and numeracy are and how I can support teachers. Over the last year, I’ve really dived into data and become a lot more data-informed with my team. Now I can look at results and say, “Oh my gosh, take a look at where these results are. This is what we need to do.”

Stephen Hoyland
So for me, as a goal right now, it is to better understand how I can support students to become better math and numeracy learners in our school division—and, with that, what I need to do to support our teachers. So right now, math and numeracy are something I am totally immersed in, learning more than I’ve ever known.

Sam Demma
Wow, that’s awesome, man. I think those are skills that benefit anybody, no matter what pathway they pursue in the future as well.

Stephen Hoyland
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Sam Demma
One of the things that stood out to me when we collaborated with some of your schools and with Rayanne, your colleague, was that all the decisions you were making were based on data. And I think it’s so important that we make decisions based on data, not our personal assumptions or opinions.

Sam Demma
In fact, I’m making all these connections because now I’m reading this book. But this gentleman, Ray, was running a hedge fund, and that was the majority of his career. The decisions they were making were based on all the data they collected on the stock markets and different companies. They would input equations that would take all the previous data of years of financial numbers and projections and say, “If we made this decision based on all the previous data, what would our outcome be?”

Sam Demma
Then people would argue about it, saying, “Well, no, we need to do this.” Their philosophy was, “We have constructive disagreements, and then we test our ideas on data. Whatever the best outcome the data shows us, we move forward with that.” I think that’s kind of how you operate and how Rayanne and your team operate. Has the data surprised you in any way, shape, or form based on student needs or things that are happening in the schools?

Stephen Hoyland
Yeah, it has. There have definitely been some great surprises. Last year, we created a new survey that we shared with parents, guardians, students, teachers—basically anybody that was a stakeholder. We put it out there and had a great response. There was a lot of positive feedback around where our school division has been and what we were doing to move forward.

Stephen Hoyland
It was kind of an affirmation of the positive things that have been happening in our school division for probably the last several years. Then there was also that voice saying, “Hey, have you considered this?” That’s the point, Sam, where we’re at right now—like, okay, we’ve done some really good things, but now it’s time to look at what other things we have to try. That came out of the data as well.

Stephen Hoyland
The thing I’ve learned with it is, if you’re going to ask people’s opinions—if you’re going to say, “We need this data”—you have to do something with it. You have to let everybody know that you’re actually doing something with it. Because it’s meaningless if you just take it in and don’t share those results or the next steps. That’s the biggest takeaway for me: if you want people’s opinions, if you want their voice, you have to make sure you value it and follow through with it.

Sam Demma
We have interacted three or four times now—three, maybe two or three times on Zoom calls, and once in person. There’s been a couple of consistent things every time: we’ve always laughed in some capacity, we’ve always smiled, and we’ve always shared stories. I’m wondering—you strike me as someone who’s very optimistic and someone who looks for the positive sides of things in life, because it is a choice. Is that something you taught yourself to do? Was it passed down from your parents? In a world filled with challenges, we could choose to focus on anything. You hold this really positive energy—where does it come from?

Stephen Hoyland
You know, yeah, I definitely grew up in a home where there was lots of love. There was always support from my parents. And then I married a wonderful, wonderful high school sweetheart, I guess you could say. We’ve tried to create a family where our kids know there’s always love, and we try to be optimistic about everything.

Stephen Hoyland
One thing I try to do, Sam, every day when I walk into this building is—people ask me how I’m doing, and I’m honest, and I’m usually excellent. And I’m excellent because my drive in could have been a wonderful sunrise, I had a great coffee, I listened to some great songs—I listened to The Lumineers this morning, man, that woke me up, it was fantastic. Just finding those little nuggets in life that really bring you contentment, because life is good. There’s a lot of great things. If you can find that and be that example for other people, you can spread that optimism and that energy.

Stephen Hoyland
It’s much easier to have a smile than a frown. And you know what? Hurt is contagious too, but people need energy, people need positivity. If I can come across as authentic—which is my goal—I want people to understand that there’s a lot of good things happening in life, and I try to find that every day.

Sam Demma
I think it also models the behavior for students. Like you said, it’s contagious, and especially as an adult or a teacher. I remember some of my teachers—I’d walk into the room and hear, “Good morning, how’s everyone doing?” Some kids were still waking up, but I’d reply, “Good morning, sir, how are you?” It really wakes you up.

Sam Demma
I’ve even had experiences in my own life where I was feeling upset or frustrated, and I walked onto a bus where the driver was singing music and cracking jokes. The way other people show up and the energy they carry has an impact on how I feel. I think it’s the same in the workplace or in school buildings. When you think of people who have had a big impact on you, who comes to mind? I’m assuming your parents, it sounds like. But have you had any other mentors or role models who have really shaped the way you think about things? When you think about your own journey, who are the people whose names you can’t leave out?

Stephen Hoyland
I was really fortunate growing up in a small town, so I got to know a lot of people who made a difference in my life—neighbors who were like grandparents. But as time went by, I’ve had the privilege of working with some wonderful, wonderful teachers and other administrators—assistant principals who have given me great inspiration and affirmation around the work we were doing together.

Stephen Hoyland
For me, it’s about being part of a team and surrounding yourself with people who challenge you, inspire you, and feed you with their energy and great ideas. Right now, I’m on a team that fills my bucket every day, brings me energy, and challenges me to think and do better. So to answer your question, it’s surrounding yourself with people who lift you up and are open to great suggestions—while you’re also open to theirs—and you work collaboratively. And honestly, my kids. I have three kids, and they give me a lot of inspiration, great ideas, and they inspire me to do better.

Sam Demma
One of the things my godfather told me while golfing was this: “You have to create an environment that encourages mistakes but doesn’t tolerate not learning from them.” So when a mistake is made, it’s like, “Congratulations, let’s talk about this,” and then you have an open conversation.

Sam Demma
In your own career, are there any quote-unquote “mistakes” or learning lessons that have been instrumental for you—aside from the fact that you cheer for the wrong hockey team? Is there anything else that sticks out?

Stephen Hoyland
You know, yeah, over my career, I’ve definitely made some mistakes. I’m just trying to pinpoint something… Well, you know what? It kind of ties to mistakes and challenges. I wanted to become bilingual, so I went to the Faculté Saint-Jean. After a year, I realized, “I can’t do this. I just cannot. I don’t have what it takes.” And my dad said, “Well, you know what, son? If it’s something you can’t do, then look at other options.”

Stephen Hoyland
So what I did was I applied to another faculty that was all in English. At that time, I thought it was a great idea. I got accepted and was ready to leave the Faculté Saint-Jean. But something pivotal happened. I went to Quebec for a summer. I went to university there for three months, and during that time, I realized, “I can do this. I do have what it takes.”

Stephen Hoyland
During that summer, I was writing letters back to the university, saying, “Please, I don’t want to leave. I want to stay. This is where I want to be.” Thankfully, I was able to stay. At the time, I thought it was too much, but stepping back and reflecting helped me realize I could do it. Sometimes you need to put things in perspective and understand you’re not alone—there are people who will help you. Part of it is believing in yourself.

Stephen Hoyland
What happened, Sam, is I actually took an extra year to get my first degree. That’s because it was all in French, and I look back at that now—it was probably the best thing I ever did.

Sam Demma
Year well spent.

Stephen Hoyland
Yeah, it sure was.

Sam Demma
Your role now is having such a great impact on so many—you’re supporting staff, whole school buildings, and students and their families. What is your leadership style? How do you believe you effectively lead other people?

Stephen Hoyland
You know, I really believe, Sam, that it’s about the team. I believe I need to be in contact with administrators, principals, and assistant principals. I need to be talking with teachers. For me, it’s about getting their voice and weighing their ideas with my own thoughts. I want to consider what I think is best versus what’s practical.

Stephen Hoyland
For me, my approach is transparency. To be transparent, I need to listen and collaborate with those people who are walking the walk and learning every day. Being very collaborative is the basis of how I lead.

Sam Demma
Outside of the work you do with the school board, what do you do personally to ensure your own cup is full so you’re showing up laughing, smiling, and supporting others?

Stephen Hoyland
One thing my wife and I truly love to do is hiking. We live on the prairies, but we have beautiful access to land where we can hike. On those hikes, we’ll see elk, deer, and all sorts of birds and animals. That really grounds me—it brings me peace and contentment.

Stephen Hoyland
Spending time with my family is also huge. My kids live in Edmonton and Calgary, so we visit them as much as possible. That brings a sense of connection and fulfillment. Talking a lot with my wife is important too—having someone who understands life and listens to you makes a big difference.

Stephen Hoyland
And one more thing, Sam—I’ve been trying meditation. I’ve been doing it for about two months now, and I’m a huge fan of it.

Sam Demma
Ah, that’s awesome, man. I’m so glad it’s going well.

Stephen Hoyland
Yeah, it’s great.

Sam Demma
I’ve had good experiences myself, and when things feel more challenging, I notice I haven’t meditated in a while. Maybe there’s a correlation.

Stephen Hoyland
Yeah, I totally get that. Meditation is very peaceful—it’s kind of like a reboot.

Sam Demma
Yeah, it helps you. One of my friends said meditation is not about calming your mind, it’s about losing your mind. Recognizing that some of your thoughts aren’t even yours, and you can let them pass by.

Stephen Hoyland
Yeah, absolutely.

Sam Demma
This whole conversation felt like a nice reset or reboot for me. I appreciate you taking the time to share your ideas, philosophies, and stories. I hope we have another chance to cross paths soon. And when we do, hopefully, there won’t be any bears or elk around—I don’t care much for those things. But keep up the great work, my friend. It’s a pleasure to chat.

Stephen Hoyland
Thanks so much, Sam, and thanks for making a difference in so many lives.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Stephen Hoyland

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

December 10, 2024 by Battle School Division Education Educator Student Leadership Student Success 0

Sylvain Bastien – High school teacher/guidance counsellor at École Secondaire Catholique Renaissance

Sylvain Bastien – High school teacher/guidance counsellor at École Secondaire Catholique Renaissance
About Sylvain Bastien

Sylvain Bastien is a high school teacher/guidance counsellor at École Secondaire Catholique Renaissance in Aurora, Ontario.  He is a proud franco-ontarian, born and raised in northern Ontario who enjoys the little things in life, or “petits bonheurs” as he likes to call them.  Former camp counsellor, gymnastics coach and national-level athlete, Sylvain spent most of his time growing up in a leadership role or working with kids.  He knew from a young age that he would become a teacher and continues to be a leader in his school community.  

For the first part of his career, Sylvain was a physical education teacher and shared his passion for a healthy and active lifestyle with students in courses like Fitness and Kinesiology.  He then moved to a guidance position before the pandemic and, with the help of his colleague, is continuously finding new ways to improve student well-being, student engagement and school spirit, all with the end goal of helping students become the very best version of themselves. 

Sylvain coaches the cross-country and track and field teams, works with the student council and helps with many other clubs and activities at the school.  He leads the SHSM Program at the school and has been a department lead for many years.  He is always seeking personal and professional growth by running, reading and balancing the demands of a chaotic life with three kids in sports! 

Connect with Sylvain Bastien: Email

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Resources Mentioned

École Secondaire Catholique Renaissance

SHSM Program

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 Demma. And today we are joined by Sylvain Bastien. He’s a high school teacher, guidance counselor, and one of my good friends. He is someone who I met just over a year ago now, and he’s running a lot, so you should follow him on Strava. But he’s doing a lot of good work. Sylvain, please take a moment to introduce yourself.

Sylvain Bastien
Hey, Sam. Thank you very much for having me on the show. This is a pretty cool experience, and I’m happy to be here. Like Sam said, my name is Sylvain. I’m a high school teacher. I’ve been in the education world for over 15 years now. I started out with phys ed courses, fitness classes, teaching kinesiology. And then, I’d say about seven or eight years ago, I moved over into guidance, which was a big change for me. So I have since been a full-time guidance counselor with the odd course here and there, kind of keeping my foot in the classroom, which is really what lights me up the most. So yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at in my professional world.

Sam Demma
When you were a national-level athlete, did you think you were one day going to work in education? Like, what was your own path like as a student?

Sylvain Bastien
I feel like education was always calling my name. I’ve always been involved with different activities that involved kids or teenagers and communities. It started out, even myself when I was in high school. Every opportunity I had to do something fun and be around my peers, that would just light me up. Then I kind of took the initiative of leading different activities and kind of took over some activities, and that just lit up the fire even more.

This led me to work at summer camps for seven summers, where kids would come spend their Monday to Friday with us. It was a residential camp, so they’d stay overnight. My involvement in gymnastics obviously always had me around young athletes and kids of all ages aspiring to be the next best gymnast. So, I was always around kids, and that always kind of fueled me. I knew that once I would have to move on to my career, the education world was where I was heading.

Sam Demma
How did your own involvement in sports growing up shape your future?

Sylvain Bastien
Yeah, that’s a really good question. And I talk about that all the time. Whether it be sport or any extracurricular, I feel like that really is what shapes you as a person. And I credit many people for that in my situation. It definitely did shape me because I had the pleasure of being surrounded by individuals with the same mentality and vision as myself.

It pushes you to learn things that you don’t always learn in a school setting or at home. It makes you develop certain habits and discover new things about yourself. I feel like all those years were definitely the good years. I owe a lot of who I am today to what I did back then.

Sam Demma
Sports still continue to be a massive part of your life because you’re in the parking lot of swimming pools a few times a week, and you’re also spending lots of time running. How important do you feel exercise is in ensuring you show up to the best of your ability at school?

Sylvain Bastien
It’s always been a big part of my life. Every day I had something active or an activity going on. Because of everything that gave me as a person, I feel like I want to give it back to as many people as possible.

In the early years of my career, when I was in the fitness classes teaching kids, we’d start with a group of 15 kids who had never run before, and they didn’t want to run. All they wanted to do was lift weights. I put them on a mission and said, “Guys, we can do something pretty cool if we set our minds to it.”

My tradition with my fitness class was always to plan to run a 10k with the students. We would have the semester to do it. At the beginning of the semester, the kids were always unsure if they could do it. But then they got into the swing of things, discovered a lot about themselves, and realized they were capable of pretty big things.

Sam Demma
One of the consistent things about your career has been working with young people, whether as a coach, guidance counselor, or teacher. How do you think you build effective rapport and relationships with young people?

Sylvain Bastien
I feel like it’s a lot in what we do and what we display as a person. We have to be the leader and set the example we expect our students or kids to follow. I strive to show students that it’s okay to have fun and be yourself.

We live in a world now where everything could be made easy, but I really try to build on the satisfaction and reward factor of putting in the work and seeing progression. That feeling of pride and accomplishment is what I want them to chase.

Sam Demma
Would you be willing to share one of those moments that reminded you why you started doing this work in the first place?

Sylvain Bastien
One of my favorite moments is at the beginning of the school year, when we host a traditional camp to welcome new students. Senior students lead activities for younger students, and it’s always a highlight. It’s amazing to see students from different social circles come together, be themselves, and shine. It reminds me why I love doing this work.

Sam Demma
In a world where students are constantly comparing themselves to others on social media, what challenges do you see students carrying on their shoulders?

Sylvain Bastien
A big challenge is students being afraid to be their authentic selves. In guidance, we focus on creating an environment where students feel it’s okay to have fun and be themselves. It’s a constant effort to help them build the skills they need to succeed and thrive.

Sam Demma
You also spearhead the SHSM programs at your school. Can you explain what SHSM is?

Sylvain Bastien
SHSM stands for Specialist High Skills Major. It allows students in grades 11 and 12 to earn certifications and participate in reach-ahead experiences with college and university partners, all while earning a specialized diploma in sectors like health and wellness or business. It’s a great way for students to build skills and network in their field of interest.

Sam Demma
How do you balance your professional responsibilities with your personal life?

Sylvain Bastien
It’s definitely challenging, but my wife and I make a good team. Living an active lifestyle helps us manage everything. We’ve been fortunate to find supportive communities in our kids’ sports, and that’s been a blessing. It takes a village, and we’re lucky to have one.

Sam Demma
It’s inspiring to see how you manage everything and still make time for what’s important. If an educator wants to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

Sylvain Bastien
The best way would be via email. I’m happy to connect with anyone looking for information.

Sam Demma
Thank you, Sylvain. Keep up the amazing work, and I look forward to running with you soon.

Sylvain Bastien
Thank you very much, Sam.

Join the Educator Network & Connect with Sylvain Bastien

The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.

November 28, 2024 by Education Educator Mental Health Student Leadership Teachers 0

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