Season 2, Ep. 2 – The Teaching Interpreter: Tough Conversation

Watch in ASL

Hi! Welcome to season 2 of the Amanda’s Musings podcast – this season is entitled “the Teaching Interpreter” where we will explore the various ways in which inteprreters are taught, mentored, coached, and influenced in their growth and development as an interpreter.

I’m Amanda Smith an interpreter, educator, coach, and creative. I love to discuss the puzzles of interpreting, the complexities of human interaction, and the power we have within ourselves to make a difference.

You can find the show notes at arsmithstudios.com and click the “podcast” button in the upper right navigation bar.

I want you to think about the following reflective prompts as you listen/watch:

1. What, if anything, is sparking your care for the profession, those you influence in the profession, and yourself as a leader?
2. Do you feel moved to take any action? If so, what? When?
3. What questions arise?
4. What insights & connections do you see to yourself?

Defining the Performance: Why Clarity Matters

In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about another question that I received when I was polling the audience to see what questions you had about teaching interpreting. It’s a two part question that goes together, but I’m going to divide the questions as well. So the questions are,

• how to have the tough conversations when students, when a student is not producing work that is at an appropriate level to continue with approach, continue on with the program,
• when they aren’t motivated to better for themselves, versus when they are motivated doing all of the things but just aren’t making the progress needed to progress in the program.
  So as you can see, they’re related questions, but I’m going to separate them, because I think that there is tough conversations when interpreters are not producing work, and their motivation factors into that certainly, but I think motivation is a whole separate issue also. And I don’t mean separate in that it’s unrelated. I mean separate like it deserves its own space.
  
  So as I talked about in the first episode, I think one of the most important things that we can do is actually define what it is that we’re talking about. So again, that Albert Einstein quote about if “I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes defining it and five minutes searching for a solution”.
  
  So I think I want to start the kind of conversation about this question with some questions to help us frame it, and maybe come up with some buckets that then lead us into conversation where we can start looking at solutions. So when we think about who students are, what our expectations are in our programs at various levels, and then student performance, we have to define, and I think that’s what the second question was getting at. We have to define what the actual problem is, because it’s going to depend how you answer or how you address a student, depending what their issue is. But I think it can go beyond motivation, certainly.
  
  So I was just doing some light research into this kind of topic, thinking about it from a strengths based perspective, thinking about it from a performance perspective, or performance training, performance feedback kind of perspective. So I think there’s a couple of things that we need to think about before we come up with these buckets.

The Faculty Mindset

One is,

• what are the constraints of the institution and overall structure so of a program, right? So, so there might be a program that doesn’t have any entrance screening because their institution doesn’t allow that. It’s open access to anybody who’s who enters. So the types of students you get in those early courses are a broad swath of the population who may or may not be well suited for being an interpreter, or any of those you know kind of things along the way, but they’re in that initial class, right? Because it’s an open, open enrollment kind of thing.
• What’s the structure of the program in terms of where are gates put in?
• And I think, I think another question I would ask is, what is the mindset of the faculty member wanting to have this quote, unquote tough conversation? So am I, and I’ve come from multiple perspectives over my years as a teacher. But am I coming at this from a you’re not good enough standpoint, and that’s going to hurt the community? Are we coming at it from a you are not in a position to be successful at the next step, so it’s not kind it’s not fair for me to actually move you on to the next step, because you’re not equipped to be successful there, you don’t have the the necessary foundation to be successful. Are we coming at it from a nobody’s ever good enough because you’re not professionals, you’re still in school. That was one that I had for a really long time. Um, what is our mindset when we’re approaching this quote, unquote tough conversation where students are not producing appropriate or what the literature that I was kind of looking at would call underperforming students not meeting the expectations in the current course that they’re in, and then thinking about, how does that set them up in future courses? I think they’re also, and this might go with mindset, but I think it’s a separate set of questions.
  
  So there’s this, what are the constraints of the institution and and the the, I don’t know, the things you could leverage from the institution as well in this conversation, and then the structure, where are the gates? There is this mindset of the faculty member.
• There’s also, then the mindset of the student, right? So what? What is their mindset as they’re coming into this conversation? Do they know they’re underperforming? Do they think that they’re performing just fine? Do they not really care? Do like, what is their mindset, which I think goes with the second question that came with this around motivation a little bit, but I think it also has to do with their own self awareness, which is a really important skill as an interpreter in terms of, I need to know where I stand, so that I know what kinds of jobs are a fit for me and what kind of jobs are not a fit for me.

Responsibility

And then I think that there’s this another there’s this other area of whose responsibility is it? And it is pretty vague in this scenario, but whose responsibility and how do you allocate the energy and responsibility for it? So is it the student’s responsibility? Is it the faculty’s responsibility? Well, the answer is probably yes to both, and then, in what ways and in what allocations is the responsibility? So is it the responsibility of the faculty to fix the student, quote, unquote, fix the student. Is it the responsibility of the faculty member to alert the student, and then the student has to take it from there? Is it the responsibility of the faculty member to alert and give them some remediation practices? So where does the responsibility lie. And I suppose there’s more than just the faculty and the student in that scenario too, right? Because depending where that student is in the in the course, in the program, there could be community stakeholder responsibility as well, right? So are they out on an internship and not measuring up, or are they in their ASL one class, and not quite grasping the fundamentals of the language, right? And so, you know, there could be community stakeholders, other faculty, other disciplines kind of involved as well. So what is the responsibility? And how do we place that responsibility, where it actually goes? Right? I um, so I think those are kind of the the larger questions of, what are, what does the institution offer and constrain? What? What is the faculty mindset? What is the student mindset, and then where responsibilities kind of lie. And so if I think about this question from a faculty perspective, I’m also going to ask a whole bunch of questions of myself or somebody that I’m coaching around this who is a faculty member. I’m going to ask a bunch of questions about, like, what do we know about this student in terms of, well, I guess I’m going to go back to faculty mindset. Sorry, one second, I’m going to go back to faculty mindset. Because one of the questions I’m going to ask is, what do you believe about students? What do you believe about the capacity of anyone to become an interpreter? And if anyone can become an interpreter, then is it just a matter of time? And if you don’t think anyone can become an interpreter, then what are the criteria for a successful interpreter? And does that have to do with time, exposure, practice, those kinds of things, right? So I need to know where the faculty member is kind of coming from, and what they believe about students and their capacity within the profession. And then I’m going to ask about this particular student, like, does this student, when you think about this student, do they just need more time? But unfortunately, that one of the constraints of the institution is that we’re in a quarter system, or we’re in a semester system, and it’s time to submit grades. So what do I do? Because it’s time to submit grades, and I see the student making progress, but they haven’t made sufficient progress. Is the student stuck at one level and just can’t make it past that level? Is the student largely apathetic and just doing the bare minimum to eke through their classes? What What? What are the measures?

Data-Driven Feedback

What is the data that I have as a faculty member to even shape what I would assess the student? How did I come to the place where I decided that they were underperforming, I guess, is the question, right? Because then I’m going to use that data to have the conversation with the student. It should never,

which is a strong word, of course, should never, but it should never be a surprise to a student to hear that they’re not making it right. It should never be the first time they’ve heard that there’s an issue. There should be frequent interactions and opportunities for them to recognize, Oh, I see what happened there, or I see what happened here. And there’s various tools you can use as a teacher to help them to see the data. If I’m the only person collecting the data as the faculty member, I’m the only one who’s going to know the patterns, the over the overall, the trajectory. Now, students don’t necessarily know all of the gates that they have to get through, or all of the competencies that they’re going to need to have by the end of a program the way that the faculty member does. Now they should know, because if you have a rubric, or if you have some sort of standards, in some way, they should know what.

They should know, what kind of the expectations are, even if they don’t really understand the intricacies, or like the depth of what those things are referring to. But I should not, as the faculty member, be the only person who knows how they’re doing or senses how they’re doing. They need to also be data collectors. And part of that comes from my my bias towards the idea that I’m not going to be with them when they graduate in a couple of years. They’re going to need to know how to do this on their own. They’re going to need to know how to assess where they are, assess a job and see if they’re a fit. And that’s not a one time thing, like when I’m offered the job, that’s throughout the job, that’s when I encounter challenges or difficulties. How do I then process where I’m a fit or where I’m not a fit? And being a fit for the job is also not a black and white question. It’s not a yes or no question. It’s a in what ways am I a fit, and in what ways might I struggle, and what could I leverage?

Again, going back to I think I mentioned this in the last episode, but the idea of being kind of strengths based in the way that we approach looking for something, looking for something that they do. Well, how can we teach them to leverage those things in order to be a better fit for a job? Right? So sometimes, when I encounter students who are underperforming, oftentimes they have so many other pressures that they’re not able to really commit to being all in on interpreting and that’s a reality of the generations that are coming and have been coming for the last couple of years. And so I think that’s on us to think about, how do we how do we encourage interpreters who can’t be all in because it’s not, in my experience, those students who just have other things happening in their lives. The issue is not that they’re apathetic. That’s a different category of challenge with underperforming students. It’s that they just literally don’t have the time and energy to focus. So how can we help them get the biggest bang for their buck? What kinds of practices can we give them, what kinds of tools can we give them to really support them, and then also recognizing the constraints of time that just are the realities of the school systems that we work in?

So some of the tools that I think could be helpful in terms of data collection would be transcription and then analysis of that transcript, so discourse analysis, analysis, kinds of things back translations, and if you can get them into a situation where they’re actually relying on the interpretation and maybe even relying on their own interpretation, that’s sometimes a nice Wake Up Call of not of of the realities of What it is to navigate the world through an interpreter, even if it’s just a taste of it. So it’s not something that that you can fully understand, not being a consumer, but I do think it’s something that you can be like, Oh, I see now I am fully relying on someone else to represent me in the world, and I do actually care that they didn’t just like good enough prep for what I did, or, you know, those kinds of things, right? So anything that can help them to have that experience, even if it’s English to English, even if it’s charades or something, I mean, like any of those kinds of things that help them to get that experience, about why it matters that we are ready, quote, unquote ready, which obviously is a relative term. I also think, certainly doing some analysis of situations and consequences. So if you think about, you know, DCS and EIP I analysis, case conferencing, kinds of things can help them to become more aware of not only consequences of their deficits, but also things that they could leverage. I have certainly seen interpreters. And one of the kind of generalities that I make is that I love to work with, quote, unquote, older new interpreters who have a lot of life experience. And what I find with that population is that even if they don’t have the exact language or vocabulary, they have enough experience communicating in the world that they will figure out how to get the communication or the concept across, even if they don’t have all of the quote, unquote, right words to get it across.

Whereas younger generations, who have a whole lot of vocabulary but not a whole lot of experience, tend to get stuck in I don’t have a vocabulary word for that, and so I think playing around with, how do we actually leverage what we have to still get communication to happen, because there are no ideal situations where I’m a perfect fit for X, Y or Z, right? I’m I’m constantly having to leverage something to make up for a deficit that I have in my skill set. And so if we can teach students how to do that, right, um, and I guess I’ll just close with the idea that oftentimes we avoid these kinds of conversations. And I’m not even just saying in our field, I’m saying, I think faculty, um, avoid these conversations because we’re afraid of hurting people’s feelings. And I, I think it’s really important to remember that clarity is kindness. So if we can be clear, I’m not saying you’re a bad person. I’m not saying you’re not worth my time and energy. I’m saying, over the course of this, these three work samples, I’m consistent, consistently seeing this pattern which results in missing information, skewed information, wrong information. I guess that’s similar to skewed but sometimes just wrong information, or it’s resulting in, because maybe sometimes it’s a speed issue, right? So or it’s resulting in the consumers not being able to connect with one another because it’s too off sequence from each other, right? Or it’s resulting in whatever, and I actually because next term we’re going to be talking about and really delving into simultaneous interpreting. And so I really need to be able to see that. You can, you can I see that you have skills in translation when you have all the time in the world. I need to see that you can make decisions in the moment and go with them. Be responsible for those decisions as they play out, as opposed to wanting to go back to the drawing board in the translation process as just an example, right? And until I can see that, then you’re not ready to do simultaneous work on a regular basis, because you need to be able to make those decisions really quickly as just an example, right? But I think we can. We can be with students in the midst of the challenge of being becoming a competent interpreter, we have all and continue to be to be in the process of becoming competent interpreters. And our competence varies not to the degree that new interpreters have their their competence vary, but it varies because the situations vary, the days vary, my energy varies. All of those kinds of things vary. So it’s not a black and white I am or I am not competent. I have competence and I have deficits. And how do I manage those when I am interpreting so those are my initial thoughts.

Looking Ahead: Motivation & Attitude in Interpreter Training

I want to spend a separate episode on motivation, because I think that that deserves its own space. And of course, it overlaps with this one entirely. And then I think I also want to do another one in response to this around attitude, which again, will overlap with motivation, but very common in the field of sign language interpreting for consumers, Deaf consumers, specifically to mention the idea of, like, yeah, their language is okay, but I don’t like their attitude. And there has been research on what that actually means and how that what that has to do with how connection then happens in the interpreted interaction. So I think that would be an interesting episode as well in terms of so this question is about producing work that is not appropriate to move on in the program. So underperforming in terms of performance work, but there could also be underperforming attitudes, right? So maybe their language and their processing skills are stellar, but their attitude is not conducive to being of service to the communities and providing opportunities for connection among consumers and that sort of thing. So I think those are two more episodes that I kind of want to explore motivation and attitude, and what it is we believe about students and their motivation to be interpreters, their motivation to continue, and then things that affect motivation, and then attitude as well. And how we measure attitude, how we teach attitude? Do we even believe it is a thing we can teach any of those kinds of things? So, would love to hear your musings.

Conclusion

And again, I want to, I want you to think about anything that might have sparked your care if you feel moved to action questions that arise, what insights and connections you’re making. I’d love to hear from you about those insights ahas and questions. So feel free to reach out to me at arsmithstudios@gmail.com and you can also sign up for my very intermittent newsletter at arsmithstudios.com and click on the newsletter button in the upper right hand corner. So let me go back and answer some of these questions.