Master Mentor Curriculum

Course Module III

Section I: Course Outline

Course: Mentoring III: Practicum
Time required: 140-180 hours
Instructor hours: 3 teaching hours per week, 3-6 office hours per week
Credits: 3 credits

Course Introduction
The third course in the Master Mentor curriculum provides students an opportunity to solidify the knowledge and insight they have already gained by applying it in supervised mentoring activities. Students get their first opportunity to mentor in real-time interpersonal contexts, as opposed to an exclusively text-based course environment. Students have the option to participate in person for a two-week on campus component of the course, or they may undertake their whole practicum at a distance, working with local mentees and collaborating with on-site students via synchronous web presence, video exchange between their location and the campus location and telecommunications conferencing. (See What We Learned section of the Curriculum Introduction)

In this course the extended understanding of mentorship that students have been building throughout the Master Mentor Program achieves practical expression. The mentee guidance activities that participants undertake in this course are clearly differentiated from quick “error correction” fixes that often go with the narrow traditional view of assessment and feedback. They will not be focusing on what Taylor has called “knowledge-lean” skills like correct fingerspelling or number signs. Instead they will be discovering how to guide mentees towards development of knowledge-rich interpreting skills. In this work they will be addressing one of the most serious shortfalls in the service provided today to many deaf consumers—the commonplace loss of meaning and coherence seen in target language texts.

Course Description

The course focuses strongly on the skill enhancement aspects of a mentor’s work. Students are introduced to the theory and practice of meaning-based approaches to promoting interpreter development. They explore two key theories in this area, the Goal–to-Detail approach, developed by Sandra Gish, and the use of discourse mapping as a mentee guidance resource, as presented by Winston and Monikowski. Students identify the essential elements in interpreting practices that convey the central meanings of the source texts. They then learn how to work with mentees on prioritizing that particular set of processing and production skills. They have an immediate opportunity to apply their insights though discussion and on-site/online mentoring activities.

In addition to their work on meaning-based strategies of mentee guidance, students continue their explorations in the development and use of portfolios, and enrich their experience of open peer discussion and collaborative and cooperative learning. Students emerge from the course equipped with a strong sense of their own philosophy, confidence in their practical skills as a mentor and a clearly defined fieldwork project that has benefited from several stages of refinement through peer collaboration and faculty review.

Pedagogy

This course is aptly defined as a practicum. Learning activities are keyed to experimentation and experience with the theoretical material presented on mentee guidance. Students will once again take on the roles of both mentor and mentee in different work sessions in order to give and get feedback from each other in terms of their own mentoring skills.

As in the other courses, students reflect objectively and in detail on samples of their own interpreting work and mentoring work, and compare the results with their privileged access to their own mental processing activities. Seeing work “from both sides” in this way, provides great insight into the usefulness of theoretical models. It becomes very clear why a mentor always to take account of a mentee’s explanations of his or her own work in deciding on activities for skill enhancement.

Another key element of the pedagogy is to require students to assess and provide feedback on a wide variety of samples, and to interact with a variety of others in both mentor and mentee roles.

Course Design

Students may take a five-week version of the course, which involves an intensive two-week on-site practicum. Or, they may take a 12-15 week version entirely through distance delivery. The two student groups engage in a two-week on-line discussion forum that precedes the on-site section dates. As an on-line learning community, they collaborate on assimilating new theory presented in the readings and on review of ideas from previous courses. During their time on campus, on-site students post daily summaries of their learning experiences from the face-to-face sessions. On-line students are required to participate during this time and are expected to learn from and add to the learning of on-site students.

Onsite students are expected have done enough preparation work on their readings and review to be prepared for the intensive two-week learning schedule of the full-day on-site sessions. All students are required to have completed the interpreting skills portion of their portfolios prior to the first day of the onsite, so that their work can be shared in assessment activities relating to their own and others’ work.

The required elements are:

Examples of interpreting with formal and informal ASL as the source language
Samples of interpreting using formal and informal English as the source language
Samples of interactive interpreting in which neither English nor ASL is the dominant language
Explanations of the contexts of each of the samples and justifications for including each one in the portfolio.

Students are expected to spend between 50 and 80 hours on the three-week online discussion. For online students, these hours continue through the semester with online discussion, and face-to-face practice with mentees in their own areas. For onsite students, these hours are added to the 80 hours of class attendance to make up the workload required in a 3-credit course

Onsite Group
Students meet Monday to Friday between 8:00 and 5:00. New theory material is generally provided by the guest instructors in presentation sessions. Following these sessions, students break into smaller groups of two to three students plus an instructor or facilitator for intensive mentoring practice sessions. Each student fills both mentor and mentee roles and works with different partners during the work sessions.

Students also use work sessions to take care of business—finalizing documentation connected to their fieldwork proposals and defining the internship agreement they enter into with mentees. Each day 45 minutes is provided for reflection on the day’s learning, and for reading, preparing, and posting online commentary and discussion items to the whole onsite/online class group about the goals and difficulties encountered in the mentorship experiences, or about summaries of guest instructor presentations or responses to the postings of others.

Attendance is key to participatory learning strategies in this course and lateness or absence will result in lowered grades.

Assignments

Assignments reflect heavy emphasis on practice and the student’s responsibility for assessing and developing their own skills as mentors.

Grading

Assessment and mentoring activities 70%

Students assess and give feedback on a variety of texts, assess their own and others’ work, are mentored as interpreters and mentor others.

Interpreting portfolio 15%

Class discussion: 15%

Materials Used

No central text was chosen for this course and students work with a variety of readings and materials. They work again with the Taylor books on assessment, adapting them for use in detecting and building meaning-rich skills in interpretation. They use material provided by guest instructors and some published articles by them on discourse mapping and decision-making strategies. They work also with their own portfolio materials and those of their peers as well as a variety of interpreting samples provided to them.

Assigned readings:

Discourse Mapping: Developing Textual Coherence Skills in Interpreters, Dr. E. Winston and Dr. C. Monikowski
Required reading also includes fieldwork project final plans posted by other students as well the discussions, topic summaries and commentaries contributed by all students to the on-line forum.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successfully completing the course students will:

understand the meaning-based elements of interpreting performance
apply the insights of the goal-to-detail and discourse mapping approaches to improving interpreting performance
identify the multiple decision-making processes involved in all aspects of an interpreting assignment
listen for key mentee issues, articulate specific skill enhancement goals and exercises to enhance the particular skill area(s) identified
be able to discuss and assess proposed mentorship projects put forward by others
pass on self-assessment strategies to mentees
work effectively with a range of interpreting samples
develop and apply criteria for assessing the effectiveness of their own activities as mentors
synthesize materials presented to date in the program into a clear action template for themselves to use in all stages of the mentoring process: from assessment to giving feedback to developing and directing a skills growth plan for mentees.

Course Structure

Students cover five major themes in the course:

Theme one: interactive, mentee-centered skills feedback sessions
A major focus of all practice sessions during this module is the practice of interactive, mentee-driven meetings, following a Vygotskian approach as introduced by Colonomos and Gish, among others in our field. This approach is supported by an understanding of adult learning, and cultural and communicative competencies. Practice sessions focused on the Interpreting portfolios prepared by students, and each session required the application and practice of this approach.

This approach was chosen as the one for our sessions because, from input and experience, it has become clear that it is the most difficult for mentors to use and accept as useful. It is easy to succumb to the pressures of mentees and institutions to tell mentees what is wrong with their work, to provide a “right way” and to expose their “wrong ways” of interpreting. It is much more difficult to direct the mentees toward self-learning, and to resist the temptation to be “right.” It is also difficult for many mentors to truly believe that this approach can be effective and to trust that the mentees will learn (as Gish reminds us). Use of this approach in the practicum provides a safe and stable environment for practicing.

Theme two: meaning-based approaches to interpretation — the goal-to-detail approach
Students explore ways to support mentee interpretations that deliver quality information, using the “goal-to-detail” approach developed by Sandra Gish. Using this model, mentors help mentees to set priorities in their information capture decisions.

Theme three: meaning-based approaches to interpretation — discourse mapping
The technique is a way to identify the structure of any text by creating a visual representation of it. Pictures not words or phrases are used in making the map to get the real sense and structure of a text. The approach leads students through an analysis of linguistic features that contribute to the meaning, and allows them to construct target texts that build on the maps and analyses they have developed.

Theme four: mentoring practice — adult interactions
Students apply interactive mentoring approaches to multiple mentoring sessions. They exprecience both mentoring and being mentored on their interpreting portfolios.

Theme five: skill enhancement activities
The goal of mentors in this program is not simply to help mentees identify interpreting skills challenges. Once they have been identified, it is essential to provide guidance in skills enhancement. Continuing the emphasis on mentee-driven approaches, students move from interactive sessions for identifying skill patterns to interactive sessions for developing activities. These activities are based on specific, example-based patterns. Mentor and mentee collaboratively explore possible activities and materials that will address the skill pattern, and develop explicit objectives, actions, and results for the activities. The activities resulting from these sessions provide detailed, step-by-step procedures for practicing, and a means of measuring the results of practicing.

Section II: What We Did

In this section of the course module we lay out details of how Mentorship III was run in the pilot program. We detail the contributions of the particular group of instructors who were involved. Our objective is to spark reflection on ways to meet the course objectives when new faculty and new materials are involved.

Syllabus of the Onsite Course

Theme I: Portfolio (2 days)

Work began with intensive focus on the characteristics of portfolios and their value in mentoring work. Students solidified the understanding of portfolios they have achieved for themselves over the last two courses. Up to this point they had been challenged to take risks, had received feedback, and tried putting their ideas into practice. In all these activities, they were encouraged to ask themselves why they have made the choices they have made. Now they were introduced to a theoretical perspective on the value of those “Why?” questions.

Dr. Dennis Cokely, Director of the ASL Program and the Interim Chair of the Modern Languages Department at Northeastern University, and also the lead instructor for the portfolio component of the Master Mentor Program, opened the discussion on day one. He presented the idea that interpreting performances can be looked at as a very large set of decisions including everything from second-by-second vocabulary choice in a given situation, to meaning processing strategies, to the choice of whether to take on an assignment or not. An interpreter’s portfolio is then a historical record of the decisions that person has made in particular work contexts.

Mentors can therefore use a mentee’s portfolio to help enhance his or her ability to make effective interpreting decisions. On one level, mentees often need simply to see that they have choices and are to some extent in control of their interpretations. On a deeper level, the mentor/mentee pair can discuss patterns of processing or production choices evident in the record. By discussing why those choices were made, the pair may get at the hidden roots of unsuccessful choices and identify specific areas of skill weakness that underlie them. The next step will be to plan skill development activities that address the particular issues identified. The portfolio then serves as a benchmark against which skill enhancements can be measured. Cokely emphasized that a portfolio is always a “work-in-progress” and as such invites constructive insight from others.

Cokely suggested that one way to look the difference between novice and experienced interpreters is that the two groups have different approaches to decision-making during interpreting work. Novice interpreters begin with a predetermined set of choices and try to always pick the “right one” as they run up against a seemingly endless series of decision points. Experienced interpreters, in contrast, look for larger patterns in an interpreting situation, make an expedient choice from among many possible right choices and carry through with it. As a result they have a streamlined decision process while retaining flexibility to provide additional information as appropriate. These different strategies are reflected in the quality of work recorded.

In hands-on work sessions students brainstormed to come up with an extended list of kinds of choices interpreters routinely and often unconsciously make before, during and after an assignment. They also worked with the interpreting samples in their own portfolios in order to identify patterns in their work that they wanted to improve. These might include areas like processing speed, fingerspelling reception during voicing, ways of working with a teamer, use of SASS in English to ASL interpretations, and spatial referencing. Over the succeeding two weeks students brought their portfolio samples to a peer mentor and together they identified processing decisions that may be behind the weaknesses noted. The pairs devised specific skill enhancement activities for the mentee to undertake. In a later mentoring meeting, the pairs assessed the usefulness of the enhancement strategies used and planed future work.

Students also learned about the use made of portfolio assessments in other countries and explored the possibilities of digitizing their work to display on a PC. They got their first chance to view the work each of their peers had collected for the interpreting portion of the portfolio requirement and then broke into small workgroups to begin the hands on work of mentoring on portfolios using their newly acquired theoretical and personal insights into value of these work records. In the words of one student: “I remember so clearly how I wondered, ‘Why do we need portfolios?’ when this journey began. My question has now become, ‘How can you assess work without one?’”

Theme II: Meaning-based Approaches to Interpretation: the goal-to-detail approach

Gish opened discussion by noting that it is the mentor’s role to recognize the talents and perspectives mentees bring to the mentoring relationship and use them as the foundation for skill building. She suggested that mentor and mentee are in fact colleagues in developing strong meaning-based, or knowledge-rich skills in the mentee’s interpretation work. She engaged in some mentoring role play working with a student as “mentee” to demonstrate her approaches to eliciting information from mentees. Gish pointed out, that if 90% of interpreting goes on in the brain, and mentors can’t see that, they have to ask questions about what the mentee was thinking and feeling at particular moments in his or her interpreting work, if they want to provide useful assessment and guidance.

She emphasized that learning is a social activity and that the mentor must come to the place in which the mentee finds him or herself in order to work together from there. That is the ethical and practical foundation of scaffolding – building on what mentees know and what they want to know.

In presenting her goal-to-detail approach Gish suggested that interpreter choices about what to interpret need to be based on a distinction between quality and quantity in target messages. She emphasized that the most important indicator of quality is that the speakers goal is conveyed –whether it is to inform, to entertain, to convince. An interpreter’s first concern is then to identify the goal of the message and produce an interpretation, however simple, that reflects that goal. Levels of subtlety and detail can be added later as interpretation skills grow.

Mentors develop these meaning-based skills by asking mentees to articulate the theme of their source text. When mentees can identify the goal and themes of a message, they will also improve their skills at meaning prediction and ultimately improve the quality of their texts. Gish emphasized that mentors must insist on quality from the start by setting clear expectations. She noted that her understanding of what deaf consumers need drives her insistence on quality before quantity in signing. They have made it clear that they would rather have a simplified and clear rendition of key ideas than a garbled collection of incoherent signs providing inappropriate detail but little sense of the meaning of the sources text or the intentions and characteristics of the speaker.

She provided the following ground rules for mentoring sessions:

Anything signed or spoken must be produced using good grammar and complete sentences. For novice interpreters this standard is not relaxed — they are simply expected to produce short and simple sentences that are grammatically correct.
Every piece of work must demonstrate equivalency, but that equivalency is measured on the basis of the skill set the interpreter possesses. For instance if an interpreter cannot catch a rapidly fingerspelled name of a particular town, but can indicate “town,” Gish considers that the mentee has achieved a skill-appropriate level of equivalency.
The interpretation must flow and that means that the mentee uses appropriate discourse markers to signal the beginning and ends of ideas.
The interpreter must have some sense of control over their own meaning production.
Interpreters must not interject their own self-deprecating noise into their work. Once they have provided equivalency at whatever level of generality or detail they are capable of, they must simply stop signing.

In work sessions, students continued role play activities practicing the scaffolding and questioning techniques that Gish has built into her approach. They worked on techniques to help mentees anticipate and predict meaning from their own existing knowledge of life situations. The objective was to enhance a mentee’s ability to capture meaning in source texts and to produce meaning in target texts.

They also began the work of developing skill enhancement plans for their mentees, based on the patterns each student has identified for him or herself as needing improvement. They used Skill Enhancement Activity Sheets, which provide a formal structure for the work that each mentor/mentee pair has agreed on. Each mentee posted his or her SEAS outlining the targeted pattern they have identified in their own work that they want to work on, the activity they are doing to improve their skill in that area, the timelines for the activity and how success would be evaluated. They also read and responded to the SEAS of other students.

Theme III: Meaning-based Approaches to Interpretation: discourse mapping

Students were introduced to a second approach to building meaning-based skills in interpreters—discourse mapping. Christine Monikowski, an interpreter educator at the Department of American Sign Language and Interpreting Education at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in Rochester, NY, reviewed the assigned reading about Discourse Mapping by Winston and Monikowski , which provides an account and demonstration of discourse mapping. The technique is a way to identify the structure of any text by creating a visual representation of it. Pictures not words or phrases are used in making the map to get the real sense and structure of a text. Students practiced the technique a group, first watching a video and then producing the map from memory. The approach leads students through an analysis of linguistic features that contribute to the meaning, and allows them to construct target texts that build on the maps and analyses they have developed.

Dr. Elizabeth Winston, Director of the TIEM project, led the class in a discussion of the benefits of discourse mapping in interpreting work. Students also started work on translation or “retelling”-- working back from a map to a target discourse in either English or ASL.

Students identified benefits of using mapping techniques including:

improved ability to internalize source meaning and produce a strong account of the source text’s important meanings,
recognition that there are many different right interpretations of a text,
insight into visualization as a key skill in interpreting,
recognition of areas of weakness in ASL syntax or grammar that surface when an interpreter is working from a visual map into ASL.

In work sessions students practiced mapping activities in order to get a sense of the benefit of this technique for helping mentees to grasp meaning. They mapped a selection from their portfolios and peer portfolios. In this exercise, students discovered that texts they know intimately from work on their portfolios may be mapped in different ways by others. They focused on recognizing all the different layers of meaning in a text and the different emphases that can be pulled from it by different interpreters. They explored questions of whether different maps may be needed for denotative and connotative aspects of a source text, and how to combine both in a single map.

Theme IV: mentoring practice—adult interactions

Students apply interactive mentoring approaches to multiple mentoring sessions. They experience both mentoring and being mentored on their interpreting portfolios.

Theme V: skill enhancement activities

The goal of mentors in this program is not simply to help mentees identify interpreting skills challenges. Once they have been identified, it is essential to provide guidance in skills enhancement. Continuing the emphasis on mentee-driven approaches, students move from interactive sessions for identifying skill patterns to interactive sessions for developing activities. These activities are based on specific, example-based patterns. Mentor and mentee collaboratively explore possible activities and materials that will address the skill pattern, and develop explicit objectives, actions, and results for the activities. The activities resulting from these sessions provide detailed, step-by-step procedures for practicing, and a means of measuring the results of practicing.