Mentoring at Moreland Community Childcare

https://player.vimeo.com/video/312635136

[On-screen text: Ali Teece - Pedagogical Leader, Moreland Community Child Care]

Ali Teece: My name’s Ali Teece. I work at Moreland Community Child Care, I’m the Pedagogical Leader here.

I started mentoring Rebecca this year when she came to our service as a provisionally registered teacher.

[On-screen text: Rebecca Tanner - Early Childhood Teacher and Educational Leader, Moreland Community Child Care]

Rebecca Tanner: Coming in for the first time I felt a little bit nervous, as you would starting any new position.

But I think the support from the organisation and knowing that I would be mentored and supported really helped my confidence.

Ali Teece: I went and did the Effective Mentoring Program earlier this year, because I wanted to understand the best way I could support Rebecca.

Rebecca Tanner: So, my mentor Ali she helps me in many ways.

We meet up every fortnight so we can have a chat about things.

If I’ve got something that’s not going quite well, I can talk to her about what I can do to support the children and she can support me.

Ali Teece: Sometimes we’d go for a walk together and that was our chat, other times we’d have a formal conversation and go through where she was up to.

Rebecca Tanner: She’s easily contactable, even if she’s not here. I can easily give her a call.

Knowing she was there if I needed was a really beneficial thing for me as well.

Ali Teece: We also scheduled times for me to come and observe her in the classroom.

Rebecca Tanner: She’ll work on my terms, when I’m ready. Rather than saying “we need to start now, we need to do it this way”, she’s allowed me to facilitate it and then she’s just been there to encourage me as I’ve gone along.

Ali Teece: I feel the mentoring process has benefited Rebecca in allowing us to have a few difficult conversations that we maybe would not have had.

Rebecca Tanner: We established that it was going to be a non-judgemental relationship.

So, knowing that the mentor is there to support and guide you is a really good thing.

Ali Teece: I think for me the benefits of being a mentor were learning the skill of mentoring, because it’s something I use across our whole service now.

It makes you look back at your own practices a little bit and rethink and think ‘why do I do that?’.

I think there’s a need for mentoring because we want our teachers to be able to grow and we want to have amazing educators in the future and I think early childhood teachers, particularly new graduates, become very isolated.

They often work alone or are the only teacher in their service.

I think that can be very daunting and they struggle and just go into this survival mode.

Rebecca Tanner: So, having a mentor has helped me grow so much over this year.

I feel like my confidence in the classroom has grown.

Being able to share experiences and learn from each other, it really enables me as a teacher to lift my confidence and try new strategies in the classroom.

Ali Teece: That’s been really rewarding for me to see her confidence grow and to see her managing the children in a way that benefits the learning outcomes for them.

[End of transcript]

Updated 4 April 2025

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Mentoring at Moreland Community Childcare

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