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Goodstart says curiosity is a key ingredient for success in Centre Director role
Freya Lucas
Aug 27, 2021
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Centre Directors at Goodstart Early Learning have been participating in a national program, designed to sharpen inquiry driven leadership and coaching skills.
The Lead2Learn program was developed last year with support from Goodstart’s Chief Learning Officer, Jason Renshaw. Centre Directors participate in a quarterly process where they identify a key challenge or a key area of curiosity in their own context, and develop ideas to improve or fix something, or do something even better.Through the inquiry process, they identify key questions, explore and research, set up experiments, and measure the outcomes. They then have the opportunity to collaborate with other Goodstart Centre Directors around Australia to compare what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not, and to share ideas and advice. They also critically reflect and align their inquiry work to the National Quality Standards and the Goodstart Foundations for the Future outcomes and indicators.
Centre Directors are the focus of the program because of the integral role they play in each service, influencing the child, family and employee experience as well as continuously driving better outcomes and benchmarks around quality early learning.
Outcomes from the process are shared nationally through weekly Lunch & Learn2Lead webinars, where a Centre Director talks about what they investigated, the key questions they asked, how they experimented with the idea, and what they learned.
One recent example was shared by a Director from WA, who explained how she had grown the service’s community profile without leaving the centre, through conscious use of social media and technology, building strong connections with other community groups, local government representatives, and Indigenous groups. The results have been fantastic and the opportunity for collaboration has increased.
Another Director from Queensland used the program to explore workforce challenges after finding it increasingly difficult to attract the right people to the team. She collaborated with the local university and other groups to hold an education session on how to use art to support children’s learning. She discovered that by hosting a unique event and using LinkedIn to promote it she was able to attract higher quality candidates than other social media channels. The event was well attended by educators and teachers from across Brisbane. As a result, she has since hired a number of people and has built a profile for the centre as a great place to work and to develop ECEC skills and careers.
To learn more about career opportunities at Goodstart visit the careers page, here.
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