Coaching & Mentoring

Gowrie Victoria specialises in coaching and mentoring for the early learning sector.

Our team of expert coaches and mentors are all experienced early childhood professionals and are based across Victoria. Their role is to understand your needs and goals and support you to develop strategies to achieve these. As they facilitate the process, they will draw on their own experience and also share current examples and resources from Gowrie’s early learning programs and services. This ensures that coaching and mentoring programs are relevant to the needs of teachers and educators and lead to tangible and practical outcomes.

Our team delivers several programs for the Victorian Department of Education as part of Best Start Best Life:

What is Coaching?

A coaching conversation helps unlock potential through raising awareness and supporting an individual to identify their own goals, articulate their current reality, explore options for development, take action and form habits. A coaching conversation requires active listening, skillful questioning, and a high level of emotional intelligence.

At Gowrie we talk about a culture of coaching. This is one where a coaching approach is adopted in a wide variety of interactions. It happens formally through a specific program or in  meetings between a leader and a team member. It also happens informally, as a way of working and engaging, to embed learning and develop skills and capabilities.

Gowrie works closely with Growth Coaching International (GCI), a specialist coaching and coach training organisation, to train our leaders, coaches and mentors to be skilled coaches.

There are various coaching models that provide a framework for coaching conversations. The model that Gowrie Victoria endorses and uses is the GROWTH model utilised by Growth Coaching International. Although this is a framework and not a script or formula, it provides a structure that supports the purpose and outcomes for coaching conversations.

Stage	Description
Goal	This is where the coachee gains clarity about what they want to achieve or where they want to be regarding the topic that they are being coached in.
Reality	This is where the coachee explores what they are currently experiencing and helps establish where they are in relation to where they want to be as a starting point for positive movement.
Options	This is where the coachee explores a range of options for moving toward to where they want to be and is a time for divergent thinking. It aims to increase the coachee’s sense of control and helps them assume responsibility for taking action.
Will	After exploring many possible options, this is where the coachee starts to focus on their preferred options and commits to taking action.
Tactics	Now that the preferred options have been identified, the coachee now gets more specific and identifies precisely what they will do, how and when.
Habits	This is where the coachee identifies what is required for sustained success, through exploring the resources, attitudes and support that may be required to see their actions through.