Mentoring for Paediatric OTs
Work With Michelle
Michelle is passionate about helping Paediatric Occupational Therapists gain the expertise, clarity and confidence they need to support the children, families and educators they work with in reaching their goals.
Michelle is driven to offer mentoring for two reasons: she wants OT’s to provide impactful and neuro-affirming intervention, and she offers it from a place of deep gratitude to all the OT’s who have supported her professional development.
Who Do I Mentor?
Many of the OTs I mentor are listeners of Spirited Conversations, the podcast I co- host with Tracy Stackhouse and Cory Dundon. They have a sense of what to expect from me before we’ve even spoken: warm, grounded conversation, open, fun loving, rich in reflection, and based in evidence-based, clinically informed thinking.
What Mentoring Looks Like
Michelle wants mentoring to be a safe place for OT’s to bring their issues and questions. She co-creates the mentoring experience with the people she works with, following their preference of style, format and content of sessions.
Some OTs want support with clinical reasoning, including determining assessments undertaken, formulating intervention based on assessment data, planning intervention, clinical reflection on their therapeutic use of self as well as interventions. OT’s either share a short video of a client (with consent), just 2–3 minutes long or send a description by email before meeting.
Other OT’s want to focus on OT theory and approaches or service structure and processes.
Timings & Prices
- Frequency: weekly, fortnightly or monthly
- Payment: Direct transfer. International payments made via Wise
- Value: Starting from $220 (incl GST) per hour
Why Mentor With Michelle
Michelle’s career has been shaped by a passion for learning, collaboration, capacity building and evolution. She has over 30 years’ experience as an Occupational Therapist, more than 13 specialising in paediatrics. This belief in the power of knowledge to drive professional growth and positive change led her to complete Master’s in Adult Education because of her belief in the power of information sharing to support professional growth and positive change.
Alongside her clinical work, Michelle has spent years supporting the growth of other OTs: ten years supervising and mentoring staff at SEED Paediatric Services, and, before that, roles as Professional Development Manager at the OT Association of Australia and in the Learning and Development team at CRS Australia. Mentoring individual OTs and OT teams across Australia has grown naturally.
Michelle is also co-host of Spirited Conversations, a podcast ranked in the Top 3% of podcasts worldwide (Listen Notes), which, grew directly out of her own mentoring conversations with Tracy Stackhouse and Cory Dundon made public as a way of sharing the experience of mentoring and the wisdoms of Paediatric OT across the world.
SpIRiTed CONVERSATIONS Podcast
Tracy Stackhouse, Cory Dundon and Michelle Maunder are paediatric Occupational Therapists with a shared passion for the pursuit of knowledge. They are the Spirited Conversations Podcast hosts.
Driven from a desire to inspire and engage with other paediatric OT’s, they decided to share their regular clinical conversations with others. Not because they know all the answers but because they have an unwaivering drive to deepen their knowledge and skills and a willingness to share their learning with others in the hope that it is helpful and inspires others to engage in mentoring.
Tracy’s ability to make clinical reasoning and neuroscience accessible to all is incredibly powerful and worth sharing.
Tracy Stackhouse
Developmental FX – The Developmental and Fragile X Resource Centre
Cory Dundon
