Master Mentor Curriculum

Introduction

Preface

Objectives of the Document

This document provides information on the principles followed in designing and developing the Master Mentor Program, as well as detailed information on the program itself. It is designed to help others understand the philosophy underlying the approach and to offer the curriculum through their own institutions so that more Master Mentors can emerge. The knowledge and skills they acquire through the program can be used to make an important contribution to the field of interpreting.
We hope that through the dissemination of this document we will start building a network of people interested in the long-term integration of mentorship into the field of interpretation. At the end of the Implementation Guide we ask readers to contribute their own ideas and feedback by answering a series of questions about their situations and expectations.

How to Use the Document

The document is divided into sections to help readers to locate the information that is of most interest to them.

The Curriculum Overview details the processes and perspectives used in building the pilot program. The "What We Learned" section at the end offers an account of what worked well and of adjustments that were made for the second cohort of students. It also includes, when possible, current revisions being made for Cohort 3.
The Curriculum Implementation Guide provides instructors and administrators with insights into using and building on to the curriculum. We stress that the value of our curriculum development experience was to clarify a philosophy and a pedagogy for developing mentors who will be able to make a substantial and self-perpetuating contribution to improving the quality of service provided to deaf people. As others build on these foundational ideas, there is a great opportunity to find and incorporate new scholarship, new materials and new participants into the curriculum. In the process of re-use, the curriculum can be tailored to the needs of particular regions and particular communities of deaf people across the country. In turn, these new learning, teaching and community-building experiences will enrich our overall understanding of the tremendous potential of mentorship in our field.
The Course Modules describe in detail the four courses making up the Master Mentor Program. Each module is divided into two sections:
- Section I provides the course description.
- Section II provides details on how we covered the required knowledge and skills. It lays out the contributions made by particular guest instructors who participated in the first run of the curriculum. This background on “what we did” is offered as an example of how the course objectives can be met. In future offerings of the curriculum, we expect that different lead and guest instructors will participate. Each of them will have their own contributions to make to extending the knowledge and practice of mentorship in the field of interpreter education.
Appendices
- see printout

Curriculum Overview

Developing Master Mentors

A Short But Promising History

The National Master Mentor Program was launched in 2001. The students who enrolled were working interpreters with expertise in signed languages, in English and in the interpretation process. During their first year they embarked on a challenging exploration of the concepts and practice of mentorship. Then, in the final phase of the 16-month program, they carried out approved plans to deliver mentoring support to interpreters in their local communities. Their projects were developed either independently or with agencies or regional programs in their home states, and targeted local priorities. As a result, approximately 95 interpreters nationwide received immediate mentoring support to improve the quality of service they provide.

Mentoring as Skill Multiplication
This short history shows the tremendous promise of educating mentors to work with interpreters in their local communities. Quite simply mentors are capacity builders and skill multipliers who know how to guide adult learners in a life long process of professional self-discovery. Interpreters paired with mentors learn to assess their own skills and to set clear targets for themselves. They can also apply techniques that have been modeled by their mentors to support skill enhancement in their colleagues.

Building the National Master Mentor Program (MMP)

It was one thing to envision a corps of highly skilled and motivated mentors fanning out across the country to support working interpreters and regulators in their efforts to improve service to deaf and hearing people who work through interpreters. It was another to make it happen. Success called for knowledgeable and imaginative contributions from a large number of people skilled in many aspects of interpreting, adult education and interpreter education specifically. Because the program was delivered in large part over the web, the theoretical and technical insights of specialists in distance delivery of education were also part of the mix. (See Acknowledgements for details on contributors)

Targeting Consumer Needs

We expected that the resources we produced would ultimately benefit working interpreters and those who hire them, as well as people involved in traditional interpreter education as providers and as consumers. The project, therefore, began with research — a review of data already collected about the field of interpreter education and the dissemination of a new web survey on professional development issues facing interpreters.

Research

Our environment scan confirmed the well-recognized gap between the skills interpreters have and the skills they really need. A 1999 survey of interpreters working in educational settings, reported that the majority did not have the skills to meet the demands of their jobs (Schick, Williams, & Bolster, 1999) These alarming results are not due to failures of individuals but to systemic problems in interpreter education. Many working interpreters, who are struggling with skill deficits, have already graduated from the only available interpreting training programs in their area. However, as they moved into the workplace, they found that they needed to know much more to provide strong interpreting services. Very often there is no further formal education option available. Even if such options are available somewhere, few working interpreters have the time or financial means to participate in them. Our own survey, also conducted in 1999, showed that interpreter educators themselves felt under skilled and disadvantaged in their careers by the lack education opportunities available to them.

Articulating A Mandate

In the light of the existing challenges of the education environment, the promise of developing a Master Mentor Program stood out clearly. Interpreters paired with a skilled mentor in their community would have a tangible advantage in keeping up with best practices in the field. They would not have to leave home to upgrade their skills; they would not have to finance a back-to-school period for themselves, and they would not have to pursue an often fruitless search for educational opportunities that meet their particular needs. Through mentorship, in other words, the mountain would finally be able to come to Mohammed—and come right to his tent!

To realize that potential, we made some important choices. The program would:

fully explore the potential of mentorship as a direct route to enhancing the skills of working interpreters. We would take the opportunity to challenge the limiting idea that mentors are defined by the tasks of assessing the performance of interpreters for employment or certification purposes.
make a distinct contribution to defining the skills involved in excellent interpretation by exploring a wide range of cultural and communicative competencies involved in human communication in general. These areas of skill and knowledge are not always considered to be part of an interpreter’s education.
contribute to the field of interpreter education by developing and testing a pedagogy for producing skilled mentors.
build respectful awareness among students and faculty of a range of cultural differences, in part by incorporating knowledge and materials developed by other groups working on diversity issues.
provide students with access to top experts in the field and deliver an academic experience in which research and ideas originating all over the country could be shared, discussed and disseminated.
design a program that was inclusive in every way. It would solicit input from people with different geographic and cultural backgrounds, both hearing and deaf. It would also reproduce that inclusiveness as much as possible in the student body, in the corps of instructors and in the materials and concepts presented in the courses. All material presented to and collected would be accessible to both deaf and hearing students.
offer courses that qualified for graduate credit. This would help to build the pool of interpreter educators working on graduate degrees and therefore eligible to build up the academic side of the profession, through their own research, publication and teaching activities.
position the Master Mentor Program as the keystone element in the wider Teaching Interpreting Educators and Mentors (TIEM) curriculum. The four courses in this program would provide a development opportunity and a proving ground for a pedagogical model that we saw as key to our future work on other aspects of interpreter education. We saw mentorship as the application of specialized understanding of the needs of adult learners to foster the ongoing professional growth and self-development of these learners.
create new channels through which experienced interpreters can pass on their skills and insight into the profession to others. Currently there are very few channels by which this important capacity building can take place.

As it turned out these broad development guidelines closely matched the needs articulated by the first cohort of students.

some wanted graduate credit;
some had been mentoring informally for a long time and wanted to develop and contribute more insight into the work;
some were looking for appropriate academic training to move into a new area as their states moved to require mentoring for new interpreters;
some wanted to help to move the interpreting field forward to greater understanding of cultural diversity and saw mentoring as a viable channel for disseminating awareness.

Developing an Effective Curriculum

Mentoring has proved to be part of the recipe for successful change management in the corporate world for many years. Junior personnel paired with experienced job partners make fewer costly mistakes. They have the back up to take on new challenges, while not carrying the burden of risk alone, and the company is able to take advantage of their energy without losing the intellectual capital of established employees. An objective of the Master Mentor Program has been to bring a similar resource to the field of interpreting. Mentors can effect rapid improvement in the quality of interpreting services when they team up with novice working interpreters facing a steep learning curve on the job.

However, mentoring as a specialty in adult education is a relatively new phenomenon. People tend to assume that mentors are born and not made, and so there has been little work on how to identify and teach mentoring skills to interpreters who are not necessarily “naturals.” In addition, we needed to apply the concept of mentoring in general to the specific circumstances of mentoring ASL/English interpreters.

We wanted as many minds as possible at work on the questions of what the qualities of mentors are as they apply to interpreter education, and so we considered students in the first cohort to be valued contributors to our overall understanding. They would help us to clarify boundaries and procedures for the future delivery of the program.

We decided to build a curriculum around the concept of learning as guided discovery--we would require students to take on risky processes of self assessment, self direction and active collaboration with their peers. Students, in fact, would have to undertake the journey towards self-reliance in skill building that their own future mentees will also take. These decisions amounted to a plan to mentor program students — to help them to learn about self-development in a way that would equip them, in turn, to pass on these skills on to others.

The Pedagogical Challenge
We knew it would not be easy to initiate students into processes of learning, based on personal responsibility and peer collaboration. It is a model that is unfamiliar to most students raised in the US educational system. They would need to learn to trust themselves and each other as sources of information and evaluation in order to abandon the habit of depending on the external authority of a teacher for validation and direction. We expected participants would have to push through the confusion and disorientation provoked by this change long enough to begin to see its benefits in terms of personal and professional growth.

To support this evolution, we:

left lots of room in the program for students to put ideas and approaches they were developing, both individually and collectively, into practice.

explored new structures for student/instructor and student/student interaction that would model effective mentoring while also working towards specific skill and knowledge learning outcomes.

engaged in an open-ended curriculum design process that specifically left room for ongoing input as the courses were run. All courses were structured with strong feedback loops so they would generate input from the students participating, the instructors and Advisory Committee members. In a sense the goal was to mentor the program itself—allowing it to “try things”, to “take risks and learn.” (See Appendix B for evaluations).

provided clear and firm guidelines for participation. Though flexible in many ways, the program was not a “self study” curriculum. Students had specific timelines to meet in interacting with course material and in sharing their insights and questions with the student body. The desire to explore issues related to the curriculum with other students proved to be a very effective incentive for students to produce thoughtful, responsive and timely work. In meeting these requirements, the students were also learning conversational and feedback giving skills. They could take full advantage of the ongoing opportunity to put intellectual assets they were acquiring from the course and course materials to work in mentoring each other in both content and skills enhancement.

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Defining the Syllabus
To explore fully the promise of mentoring in the field of ASL/English interpretation, we wanted to make available the best current understanding of the processes and functions of mentoring from a range of disciplines. This approach would lead students beyond received wisdom about activities of mentors in interpretation, to an intimate understanding of the private and personal tasks they need to undertake to grow as mentors, to become in fact Master Mentors. They would, in other words, shift their focus from seeing mentoring as a narrow set of activities to seeing mentoring as a state of mind geared towards promoting life long learning in others.

The portfolio project
We made another important choice to build the program around a central interest in the use of portfolios in mentoring. Students engaged in a 16-month discovery experience in which they built their own portfolios and examined their process for choosing material. They assessed their own work samples and those of their peers, and they articulated criteria for using interpreter portfolios in helping mentees to improve the decision-making processes they display in their work.
The four course project, was designed as an exercise in self discovery and self presentation, which required each student to think carefully about what they do in their daily work as interpreters in order to decide how best to present their level of accomplishment. It was an emotionally challenging project but with correspondingly revealing results. The students were asked to consider the lack of structure in the portfolio assignment as lack of specificity: “an invitation to be creative and take risks.” (See the Implementation Guide for details on the Portfolio Project)

The Courses

After talking to a range of people with deep understanding of processes of interpreter education, mentoring, and adult education, we decided on the sequence of courses that would deliver the mixture of knowledge, skill and exploration mentoring students needed. (See the Course Modules for full details on each course)

Introduction to Mentoring
Discussion begins with a general introduction of concepts in the field – the “what” of mentoring. Students then begin a process of self-analysis to determine a path for themselves from the “what” of mentoring to the “how”. To support this exploration they are introduced to ideas and issues in cultural diversity, and adult cognitive development. Students undertake self-reflection on their own skills as communicators and consider ethical and political issues implicit in all situations where the participants do not have equal power. They learn about structuring and managing mentorship relationships and are also introduced to some analysis tools they will use as mentors to understand particular interpreting settings. In the first course students explore the concepts and practices of portfolios and prepare first and second language skills samples for their portfolios.
Mentoring II
In the second course, students then move on to more familiar territory, expanding their mentoring skills in assessment and feedback. They are, however, now in a position to approach these mentoring tasks from a new angle — incorporating perspectives on diversity and an understanding of adult learners’ experiences into their work. They begin to mentor their peers on first and second language skills, practicing effective feedback through learning-focused interactions — a Vygotskian approach. They then move on to assessing and mentoring interpretation skills incorporating a range of theoretical models of interpretation processes current in the field. Finally, they continue their exploration of mentoring portfolios. In this course students prepare the second element of their portfolios — material demonstrating their interpreting skills. They are also introduced to the business skills involved in a mentoring practice as they develop and organize their fieldwork project for the final semester.
Mentoring III: Practicum
The third course in the Master Mentor curriculum provides students an opportunity to solidify the knowledge and insight they have gained in their first two semesters by applying it in supervised mentoring activities. Some participate in person for a two-week on campus component of the course, others undertake their whole practicum at a distance, working with mentors and collaborating with on-site students via asynchronous web interactions and video exchange. The mentee guidance activities that participants undertake are clearly differentiated from quick “error correction” fixes. Students’ focus is on identifying causes of meaning loss in mentees’ work and on developing ways to move mentees towards higher quality work in which the goals of the speaker are accurately conveyed. (See What We Learned section for information on course evolution)
Mentoring IV: Fieldwork
In the fieldwork portion of the program, students take the whole range of skills they have acquired incrementally during the previous three courses out into the real world. Here they are working largely on their own, with feedback coming from the clients they are mentoring and from the organization through which the fieldwork is running. When appropriate, they also receive feedback from skilled and experienced on-site supervisors. They are responsible for all the business aspect of their project as well as for the specific activities that will encourage the skill growth of their mentees. During this semester, students develop the mentoring skills element of their portfolios. Throughout the fieldwork course, they continue to discuss their insights and experiences through online discussion, reports and analysis of their own mentoring skills.

Sequenced Learning — building on what students know

The experiences students have as they work through the program follow the phases in a mentoring relationship:

Students enter the program with little sense of the skills they will be building — initiation phase;
They gradually develop an organized set of skills and a broader understanding of themselves and their work — cultivation stage;
They begin to take on responsibility for applying their mentoring skills — separation stage; and, finally,
They move out to work in the world — no longer as “mentees” but as mentors themselves, sharing their skills and knowledge with the wider community — redefinition stage. See Appendix C, Cohort 1 Projects.

Throughout the program instructors deliberately re-introduce topics, materials and models from preceding courses to lead into new ideas. In this way students are presented with tasks that call on abilities and insights they have already begun to develop. As learners they are able to experience the value of building on what they already know, an insight acquired first hand that will strengthen their subsequent practice as adult educators.

In each successive course students also build on and revisit their own work. For instance, the samples that they produce for inclusion in their portfolios in each course become the subject of analysis in a following course. Since students take on the roles of mentor and mentee in all these assessment and mentoring activities, they develop a very thorough understanding of the information portfolios can and cannot capture.

Delivering the Curriculum

The First Cohort

Students for this program were identified and recruited through:

consultation with members of the deaf community, in order to recruit deaf and hard of hearing students and to recruit future mentors who are involved with the deaf community;
consultation with the individuals and organizations that have developed, or are currently developing, the RSA funded curricula on multicultural, deaf/blind, educational, and rehabilitation interpreting;
consultation with experts in the various specialized interpreting settings including legal, medical, and mental health;
consultation with interpreters and interpreter educators in rural and remote areas.

Students who applied had to provide a letter of intent, three letters of recommendation, testifying to their involvement in the community and their experience with interpreting, and had to have a proposal for their fieldwork project in mind. In order to insure a wide representation in geographic terms we reserve spaces for student mentors from each regional RSA area.

They also had to meet basic admission criteria. Students would need:

an understanding of and skill in the languages used by interpreters in various communities throughout the US,
some knowledge of discourse,
some experience/ability to assess both language and interpreting skills,
some experience/ability to provide diagnostic feedback based on a variety of skills assessments approaches
some experience of mentoring or being mentored

(See What We Learned for more information on recruitment and admission)

Delivery System Choices

We chose to pilot the Master Mentor program primarily in a distance education format for a number of reasons.

Distance delivery in itself solves a number of professional development issues. It provides course access to working, community-based students.
It allows students access to the few really senior faculty in the field of sign language/English interpreting wherever they may be in the country.
Through the distance delivery format, we were able to invite the participation of several senior guest instructors, and provide a very broad base of expert opinion to the students as they came to grips with articulating and building their own ideas of mentorship.
We were able to prepare and send out a wide range of visual materials—for instance each instructor was asked to contribute a signed version of their lecture, and an English translation was provided and posted on the course website.
The students learned about developing an on-line community, which they will be able to use in their future work. Web delivery was used in all courses and specifically explored by students in their second semester and fieldwork courses.

The third course in the curriculum was designed as either a four-week, primarily on-site course or a 5-week online course. The mixture of web-based and on-site delivery proved an unexpected benefit to some students, providing them with an understanding of how cultural judgments function. Students had developed working and personal relations with each other on-line before they had much knowledge about the various cultural characteristics of members of the group. When they did meet, they had already formed bonds that would not be affected by new information about visible cultural characteristics. But many recognized that this circumstance was unusual and that normally their cultural judgments would come into play immediately and have some effect, whether positive or negative, on the formation of a bond.

Program Evaluation Procedures

Program evaluation was strongly consumer-driven. Many opportunities were provided for student input as in one sense they were the “experts” on whether they were growing as mentors. Feedback channels included on line evaluation surveys connected with each course but also some more informal bulletin boards for comments not related to reading materials or assignments. Students took advantage of this forum to focus on some of the more personal elements of their learning process and share their discoveries with fellow students and instructors. Most important of all was the evaluation graduates provided of their journey into the field of mentoring in their Capstone Reports. (See Module IV)
The portfolios submitted also provided concrete information on student learning outcomes.
Four formative evaluations were carried out as the courses ran, so that any needed changes could be made.
There were also individual course reviews by external consultants to the project director each semester, and an overall program review by a qualified evaluator. (See Appendix B)

What We Learned

Perhaps one of the most valuable outcomes of this curriculum development process was that we have been able to develop a skill profile for Master Mentors and have strong indications that the curriculum in place can produce them. In fact, we have chosen to hire graduates from the first cohort to put their mentoring skills to work professionally in supporting the new intake of students and in developing course materials.

Skill Profile of Master Mentor Program Graduates

As graduates of this program, Master Mentors will be leaders in their communities and will provide models of mentoring that encourage individual growth and lifelong learning. We thought it might be helpful to break out some of the key skills expected of graduates:

Assessment Skills

Elicit information from mentees concerning reasons for error patterns and meaning production

Distinguish between interpreting weaknesses and strengths stemming from language skills and those stemming from the interpretation process

Provide assessments based on observed patterns, including both strengths and errors

Gauge the severity of particular weaknesses and the impact of particular strengths in terms of meaning outcomes

Understand the meaning-based elements of interpreting

Understand the impact of decision making skills on interpreting and mentoring

Understand the uses of theoretical models in mentoring practices

Know the assessment tools available including working with portfolios

Collaborate with mentees to develop a mutual understanding of mentee needs

Collaborate with others on assessment tasks

Mentoring Skills

Use specific examples to support all feedback in mentoring

Support self-assessment of skills and self-directed learning in mentees

Maintain effective record keeping with regard to all mentoring interactions

Take into account the impact having a mentor has on others as a person and particularly as a person in the power position of mentor

Define internal and external parameters of particular mentoring situations and develop appropriate strategies for working within them

Demonstrate knowledge of cultural values of others

Recognize cognitive and emotional strategies mentees use as they go through a process of self-development, and incorporate these insights into structuring and maintaining the mentoring relationship

Understand issues of advocacy and intervention connected to interpreting and to mentoring

Understand the processes of interactive (Vygotskian) mentoring. Listen for key mentee issues, articulate specific skill enhancement goals and exercises to enhance the particular skill area(s) identified

Apply the insights of meaning-based approaches such as discourse mapping and goal-to-detail analysis to improving interpreting performance

Develop and apply criteria for assessing the effectiveness of their own activities as mentors

Devise an ongoing professional self development plan for mentoring skills, including cultural competencies

Business Practitioner Skills

Know the key considerations in establishing mentoring programs

Be able to discuss and assess proposed mentorship projects or programs put forward by others

Handle all aspects of mentoring activities in real life settings

Share mentoring knowledge and skills to others

Network with state agencies and other organizations to address problems and opportunities in the interpreting field

Understand business aspects of providing mentoring services

Who Should Take This Program

From running the courses and from student feedback, we have identified a number of groups who would benefit particularly from taking this program. They include:

Individual interpreters interested in setting up a mentoring practice;
Employees of mentoring service providers and agencies (supported by their employers and with actual experience as interpreters, assessors and teachers);
People with responsibility for setting up internships for graduating interpreters. They would benefit from the strong theoretical grounding in mentoring adults. Since supervisors of interpreting services often go on to become interpreter educators, they would benefit from the additional academic formation the program offers;
Anyone seeking post-IEP learning who wishes to go into the interpreter education field;
Those who support our pedagogical approach to working with interpreting and ASL student mentees.

Adjustments

Our experience in running the pilot program has also suggested certain improvements we can make to various aspects of our work. Here are some of the changes we are currently implementing:

Streamlining Course Environments

Since the learning curve is not only steep but unfamiliar to students used to a more passive approach to learning, we have put some effort into streamlining out some of the “noise” in the learning environment. In the pilot running of the program we were able to identify certain areas and issues that took up a lot of student time and energy without providing a corresponding learning benefit. The course software itself was made as simple as possible, and in fact, it is being replaced by a simpler, more user-friendly software environment.

Some of the content originally presented by instructors has also been developed on commercially available CD-Roms. This includes some of material on cognitive models of interpretation process and some elements of business planning.

Students now also have access to mentors during their portfolio development efforts and the preparation of their fieldwork proposal.

Faculty Changes

We have been able to employ some graduating cohort, (one deaf and one hearing) as mentors working with incoming students.

We have set clearer guidelines on the degree of involvement expected of guest instructors.

Course Content Changes

In the third semester practicum course, we are elaborating specific activities for students participating on-line, and will set up closer links between onsite and online students. We learned from the pilot course in which there was only one on-line student, and have used the materials and that experience to develop our understanding of how to provide this kind of education at a distance. Both groups will now participate in mandatory reading and on-line discussion activities before the onsite session. The course will now extend beyond the onsite portion for onsite students who compress a lot of course hours into their two-week onsite session. This provides time for revision and enhancement of portfolio and fieldwork projects. It will run for 15 weeks for on-line students who are in a position to space out their work more evenly.

We have reduced the time allotted in Mentorship II to studying models of interpreting process, because we now require students to have this knowledge as a pre-requisite.

Screening

The program is pitched at a graduate level and not for novice interpreters or those who have not either been mentored or provided mentoring to others. Students also need to have some familiarity with models of interpreting process and demonstrate some skills in synthesis. Applicants who don’t meet these criteria would have to make up certain pre-requisite skills and background experience in order to find the program enriching rather than an experience in frustration. We will screen for these qualifications and provide additional support for students willing to take on extra work to meet the standard. One addition to the admissions process is that student’s must submit a five-minute video sample of their visual communication skills.

We have also provided certain checkpoints along the way for enrolled students. In the second course, students will be asked to demonstrate that they are succeeding with their learning experience. They will need to show that they are successfully integrating new information they are encountering into their own personal understanding and practice. While students cannot be expected to understand the whole approach to the self-development of adult learners (including themselves) at the same rate, they do need to demonstrate increasing self-awareness and improved focus on decision-making skills as they progress through the program.