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Mentoring at Early Years at Phoenix Park

https://player.vimeo.com/video/312632188

Mentoring at Early Years at Phoenix Park

[On-screen text: Alistair Gibbs, Educational Leader, Windsor Community Children’s Centre]

Alistair Gibbs: My name is Alistair. I’m an Educational Leader here at Windsor Community Children’s Centre and I’m a mentor for Lisa.

[On-screen text: Lisa Luu, Early Childhood Teacher and Room Leader, Early Years at Phoenix Park]

Lisa Luu: So, I work in a different centre to my mentor, Alistair and whenever I need to send him my VIT paper it’s through emails, and we sometimes have phone calls or Alistair also comes and visits the centre to observe my practice.

Alistair Gibbs: The benefit of my role is that I can be quite flexible with a couple of days of the week, so I can schedule time to go visit Lisa if the project calls for it, or I need to come and watch her practice to give her professional feedback.

Lisa Luu: Some enablers that made mentoring possible for me, I guess, is the support of all my 3 mentors - so Alistair, Su-Anne, who’s the kindergarten teacher, Courtney who is the Educational Leader within Phoenix Park.

They took time for me to come off-the-floor to meet with Alistair and have our VIT conversations.

Alistair Gibbs: So, I’m very lucky with the fact that I’ve got a lot of support from my employer here.

And I think it’s because we’ve all been there, we’ve all studied, we’ve all come out and felt “Oh God, what am I doing? I don’t even know where to go” and, and we’re all in this together.

It’s not a “we’re different organisations, we need to do our own path”.

We’re very much part of the same field and um, being able to help someone by sharing your experience, by guiding them, really allows you to continue your own professional development, but really ensure that the professionals that we have in the field are of the high quality that we need.

Lisa Luu: I think I would be struggling without my mentors, um, they just provide so much insight and so much encouragement, pushing me forward.

It makes me a better educator and a better teacher.

It makes me more knowledgeable and insightful.

It makes me a little more confident to do what I do.

And, it’s just nice having someone there to guide you throughout the journey.

[End of transcript]

Updated 4 April 2025



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