Curriculum Implementation Guide

“The job [of mentors], it seemed, was not so much to individualize instruction
as to enrich education so each student could take from it what he or she most needed at the time.”

(Daloz, Mentor, p.15)

Preface

We hope that readers who endorse the approach taken in this curriculum will then do their own value-adding work of tailoring what has been done to new contexts and opportunities. To support instructors and administrators who undertake this challenge we have identified some of the key elements of the pedagogy we developed. We have also described the role and tasks involved in getting the program up and running.

Information about specific content for each of the four courses has been broken out into separate course modules, for Mentoring I, II, III and IV. Each module contains an outline of material and skills each course covers. In a separate section, we also report how we handled the course material in the pilot running of the program. This information is offered as one example of how to proceed. It is likely that in future offerings of this curriculum the line up of instructors and the personal insights they bring with them will be quite different. It is one of the tremendous benefits of distance delivery that a wide pool of expertise and experience is available from across the country.

The Master Mentor Program Philosophy
We approach sign language/spoken language interpreting as a skill and knowledge set that requires a great deal more than knowledge of appropriate hand, body and mouth movements. It calls on more than vocabulary skills in the source and target languages. It even requires more than discourse-level fluency in both languages. Achieving equivalent interpretations is an ongoing process of making meaning management decisions. And those decisions need to be made in skilled, ethical and context-sensitive ways.

The goal of our approach to educating mentors is to produce graduates who can combine their own deep knowledge of interpretation with specialized skills in adult education to guide working interpreters towards improved decision-making in all aspects their work.

To produce such Master Mentors, we have designed a curriculum that:

• includes a central interest in portfolio development and use,
  
  
• encourages a broad understanding of communication competencies,
  
  
• focuses on theory and practice of adult learning and the whole mentor/mentee partnership structure that springs from it,
  
  
• builds skills in assessment, feedback and skill enhancement activities based on improving meaning-level equivalence,
  
  
• incorporates models of the interpretation process,
  
  
• develops a sense of community need and business and professional skills to address it.

To deliver this curriculum effectively, we found we had to develop a teaching approach consistent with its content and goals, and consistent with online delivery. We think, therefore, that instructors who are comfortable with this approach to learning as self-motivated discovery will have the best success in offering MMP courses. Here we offer a practical characterization of that approach together with some notes about predictable pitfalls to avoid. (See Curriculum Overview for more information on the pedagogy development process)

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Teaching Approach

We refer to our teaching style as an interactive, learning-directed approach, sourcing it to important ideas about the role and responsibilities of learners. Our field has long looked to this, for example in Colonomos and Gish, based on Vygotskian concepts. One key idea is to approach teaching/learning as a social relationship in which both parties need to establish a starting point for learning and build from there. That point is the life knowledge a student brings with him or her to the learning situation. The instructor builds a scaffold on the student’s knowledge in order to support new insights. In this way new information is always added to what the student already knows. As the students knowledge and confidence build that scaffold falls away.

The strength of this approach is that it helps students to move away from dependence on others for their learning experience and begin to depend on themselves. To nurture this process, instructors must resist the pressure that students will put on them to provide answers and to take back the role of the authority. It is important to insist that students go through with the process of making meaning for themselves. Instructors can use questions and shared discussion to introduce new material and observations to guide students forward as part of the scaffolding process.

In the Master Mentor Program each course is built around a “learn-by-doing” approach, which takes students through the difficulties and triumphs that adults commonly experience when they agree to climb on to a new learning curve. Students have to live through frustration and self-doubt in order to understand that challenging struggle is the work of self-development. Then they will be able to guide that growth process in others. Instructors too, need to understand that the benefit of the program lies in the experience of challenge that it offers, even when students are expressing discouragement and frustration.

One aspect of challenge for instructors is that there is often a lag between the time that students begin to show improved decision-making and improved mentoring skills and the time they recognize their own progress. The role of the instructor in this situation is to continue to focus on providing students with positive feedback and to exhibit patience and a strong belief in learners’ ability to learn.

In the field of mentoring in particular, students develop at different rates. Even by the end of the program only some will have really captured the full import of what they have learned, others will have developed some important insights and hopefully all will continue to experience moments of recognition as they move on in their careers.

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Pedagogy For Online Delivery

The Master Mentor Program can be offered using traditional delivery or online format. In the Curriculum Introduction we indicate the benefits we saw in the online option. You can also find additional information on the comparisons between online and traditional delivery in Appendix A.

There are a couple of important points for instructors to keep in mind in facilitating online courses.

• First, it is important to allow students to get comfortable with the digital course environment. In each of the first two semesters we gave students a week to explore how web-based learning communities work. The focus of this first section in Mentoring I and II is to set up the infrastructure for collaborative work and to clarify that each student has his or her own experiences to contribute to the group task of understanding mentorship.
  
  
• Instructors must stress the need for students to develop a digital attendance and participation record for themselves and provide a clear schedule for online postings along with guidelines about the quality of posting required.

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Finding Instructors

Instructors interested in teaching MMP courses should present a portfolio demonstrating their interpreting and mentoring skills. The portfolio would be accompanied by a written account of why they have chosen the particular samples they have submitted. They should also be asked to present about their views on mentoring. Instructors teaching these courses need to be committed to the principle of accessibility and be comfortable in requiring that all work be submitted visually as a matter of course. They also need to recognize and support a wide range of learning styles. If the choice is made to use online delivery, instructors must also understand and embrace the opportunities and challenges involved with distance learning in the online environment. Part of their role will be building online community with and for students.

Graduation from the Master Mentor Program is a strong background for sharing the material with others since there is such a strong emphasis on self-directed learning in the curriculum.

Wherever the program is offered, it would be strengthened by participation of instructors with greatest possible diversity of experience and background. Deaf instructors are a key part of the mix.

In large part the content choices we made in the pilot delivery of the program were a way to structure the input of the varied groups of guest instructors who brought their personal understandings of mentorship to the course. We would therefore recommend that in running this course, you begin with an investigation of who in your area has particular insight into mentoring and what aspects of it they could bring to the course.

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Course Materials

The instructors delivering MMP courses will have a large impact on the supporting materials used to develop mentoring skills. In the pilot program we also asked students to seek out their own materials and contribute them to the group, and many found web-sites with important topics which they posted to the group—an element of research for students. However, there is also a larger constituency defined by local factors. For instance, if there is a large deaf/blind group in your region or a large Hispanic population, their presence will influence the interests of working interpreters in the region and in turn will affect the interests of mentoring students.

The Course Modules list the particular materials we used, but they are just handholds along the way. They are less important than the learning objectives in each course and in the sequence of courses. The extended concept of mentorship developed in this program really opens the door to using a wealth of supporting materials. Many other texts and resources could have been used to provoke this exploration, and in fact others may be more current, more suitable to a particular student group, more reflective of mentoring and interpreting issues in your area.

One purpose of publishing this curriculum is to solicit suggestions from the interpreter education community about other resources that can be used. We hope instructors who teach MMP courses will indeed close the communication link, by reporting back to us about materials they find useful and why they meet the needs of either a particular group or for the field at large.

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Suggestions For Finding Locally-relevant, Theoretically Strong Materials

• Look for material from many fields, because there is no single canon for mentoring—it is a state of mind focused on helping people forward in a whole range of endeavors although there is now growing understanding of its processes articulated by various key practitioners.
• Look for materials relating to assessment that extend the definition of interpreting as involving a wide range of subtle skills that go beyond and yet are in constant interplay with language skills.
• Look for materials that provide students with:
  • support in seeing themselves in detail in the mentoring role
  • opportunities to learn about how others have defined mentoring and its functions,
  • a focus on the factors beyond linguistic ones that cause flows and blockages in communication situations,
  • ways to recognize their own cultural characteristics
• Check your own assumptions in choosing material:
  • Have you considered diversity concerns in structuring the teaching environment and choosing materials? The National Multicultural Interpreters Project (NMIP) provides valuable insights into the hegemonic culture of educational institutions and materials
• Keep a focus on theoretical ground materials should cover—(outlined in each module)
• Choose material that stimulates personal and professional reactions in you. You will need to provide commentary on materials to highlight for students the relevance of readings to their development as mentors.
• Try to use material that supports a range of learning/teaching styles.

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Roles of the Lead Instructor

Instructor as Course Organizer

The lead instructor may take on the role of recruiting guest instructors. If so, he or she will devote considerable time to integrating their contributions into a coherent structure. We found it was not effective to simply ask for voluntary participation. Effective courses are produced when the contributions of different instructors are sequenced and timed carefully. Guest faculty, who may be participating from the other side of the county, and in different time zones, need clear guidance about how and when they need to be accessible.

Lead Instructor as Student Guide

As a facilitator of on-line learning, or in a classroom setting the lead instructor:

• provides the linking commentary and highlights key questions raised by materials used. This role is particularly important in orienting students when a range of materials is used and several different guest instructors are participating.
  
  
• serves as a “logistics” authority about what students need to accomplish and when
  
  
• provides clear expectations about quality and quantity of student work
  
  
• guides students consistently towards personal and collaborative learning processes
  
  
• provides opportunities to “get to Carnegie Hall”
  
  
• spends about three hours a week teaching and an additional three to six hours in preparation time and “office” hours. In a web delivered course, some of this time goes to interaction and community building activities. The time required for online and traditional courses is similar; the activities performed are not.

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Lead Instructor as Evaluator

• Grading in MMP courses is not “instructor-centered”—that is, students are not required to provide instructor-defined answers in most assignments. However, since the courses are not free form, the lead instructor needs to be very clear on the objectives and deadlines of assignments so that student work is reflective and complex.
  
  
• Since much of the work students do is related to a journey of self discovery the only evaluation criteria that can really be used is whether assignments are “done” or “not done.” They do however need to be done within the parameters of quality and timeliness that have been laid out. For instance, required web postings must be regularly spaced out, and must be thoughtful and responsive, contributing value to on-line discussion.
  
  
• The instructor is not trying to get students to say they have learned “x,” “y” and “z,” but to evaluate a series of self-development decisions. An effective way to monitor this progress is to ask students to justify the choices evident in their work. One parameter evaluators can use is a shift in student work from implicit and unarticulated decision-making to explicit and justified decisions that the student can own with confidence.
  
  
• Traditional elements of the course like formal papers are graded in the usual academic way. Instructors can look for synthesis and thoughtful, accurate analysis of concepts presented in the course as the student has or has not chosen to integrate them into their own mentoring.

Centrality of Portfolio Development

The Master Mentor Program has centered much of its pedagogy around the development and analysis of portfolios as a key element in successful mentoring, and portfolio development and analysis is part of each of the four courses in the program.

A portfolio of someone’s work in any field shows more than technical competence, although it needs to demonstrate that too. It demonstrates the vision an individual has of their field, the breadth of skills they see their field as encompassing. It demonstrates the particular contribution the individual can and hopes to make—the areas in which they have the greatest depth of skill. It also shows the person’s decision-making skills in the elements they have chosen to include or exclude. It is, in other words, a self-portrait—an act of communication.

It is also a key tool for mentors. It is source material that a mentor can use to get at the intangibles of effective interpretation—a way to move beyond discreet skill analysis to discussion of context, strategy, self-confidence, and goals. It demonstrates approaches to communications decision-making that inform a person’s success as a working interpreter. In a mentoring situation, discussion of portfolio can be used to open discussion of skills, and skill progression, of contextual factors involved interpreting situations, and of the self-image of the individual, among other topics.

In order for the Master Mentor students to explore all the mentoring opportunities offered by working with a mentee and his or her portfolio, the students are required to go through their own challenging process of portfolio design, assembly and analysis. This project is central to the program and spread across four semesters. In each course, they put together a particular element of their overall portfolio.

Students are given little direction about what their portfolios “should” look like. They are however given clear formal guidelines about criteria to be met. There are also very clear deadlines and expectations of timeliness in place to insure that students are providing samples when they are needed for discussion and to insure that all are contributing to the collective learning process as well as taking from it/benefiting from it. The final portfolio must contain samples of work in three key areas: language skills, interpreting skills and mentoring skills.

• In the first course their focus is on producing representative samples of their skills in formal and informal usage of both ASL and English.
  
  
• In the second course, they work on samples demonstrating their abilities in interpreting from formal and informal ASL as a source language into formal and informal English. They also demonstrate the same scope when working from formal and informal English as the source language into ASL as the target language. In addition they are asked to show interpreting skills in interactive situations in which neither ASL or English is the dominant language, and to demonstrate ethical decision-making in the context of an interpreting assignment.
  
  
• Over the summer semester and during their fieldwork semester, students put together portfolio elements that demonstrate their mentoring skills in action.
  
  
• In addition to the video material presented, students provide a written account of the contexts of the work samples and an explanation of the process by which these particular samples were chosen.

Students are not left with an isolating and potentially competitive task. Portfolio development is an assigned topic of group discussion. Participants are encouraged to brainstorm together about what counts as language or interpreting or mentoring excellence in interpreting—what affects it, and what limits it. Figuring out the parameters of this central task in the program provides students with a range of questions and interests which they then bring to the readings and the work of the rest of the courses. Each step of the project scaffolds onto students’ preexisting, but perhaps unarticulated, knowledge about the language and interpretation skills that effective interpreters display. Group discussion on the ins and outs of portfolios provides participants with insight into others’ experiences and thoughts as they worked through their questions and provided a place for each student to share their own learning and experiences.

For many, this element of the program is a new kind of challenge. However, their eventual success with it leads to a major increase in their professional confidence as mentors. They face the task of defining “success” in their own terms and are then able to pass that insight on to mentees.

A key element of the project is that the portfolio samples provided by each student are assessed both by themselves and by their peers. Each student is presenter and reviewer, creator and audience, learner and mentor. In filling both these roles many students achieve breakthroughs in understanding how a portfolio can be used in a mentoring relationship to diagnose, to encourage, to plan development, to widen horizons, to broaden understanding of interpreting situations, and to encourage decision-making both skill-based and ethical, to develop the self-confidence required to be an effective interpreter and mentor.

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Building on the MMP Initiative

This program is designed to function as an organic whole with a sequenced development of skills. It is also offered as an element of graduate education so badly needed in the field. However, after reading the curriculum, you may have other perspectives on how it can be used. There is room for many voices on the major issue of how to integrate mentoring expertise into the field of interpreting as a whole. We would like all readers of it to be part of the process You have a unique perspective on where mentoring training and mentoring support fits in your work context.

Questionnaire

Your feedback to questions section at the end of the implementation guide is essential to that research. Please fill out this questionnaire online, and when you hit Submit it will be emailed directly to the Director of Project TIEM.Online.

Here are some of the questions we have:

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