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“People who are taught that learning is a struggle that often involves making errors will go on to exhibit a greater propensity to tackle tough challenges and will tend to see mistakes not as failures but as lessons and turning points along the path to mastery.”  

~ Peter Brown (2016, p.90)

The Graduation to Certification (GTC) team at the CATIE Center is excited that you will be a part of our Consortium Roundtable gathering in Salt Lake City on December 1 and 2.  As we are planning more of the details of our time together, we wanted to share some updates.  

The e-mail includes:

• The purpose of our meeting
• Information about when we will share more information about GTC program
• Information about Make It Stick

The Purpose of our Meeting

The goal of GTC is to bring together the best of both community experience as well as academic insight, so we are designing our time at the Consortium Roundtable to allow all of us to retrieve and contribute the expertise of our experience in building an effective Graduation to Certification program and transforming interpreter education. We have almost 60 people attending with collective experience in interpreting, mentoring, interpreter education, delivering vocational rehabilitation services, curriculum design, and more. It is a very talented group and we are honored that you all have agreed to come. We are working hard to create an interactive experience that allows us to draw on this collective wisdom to support the GTC program’s use of evidence-based practices and the components that we have designed.

A significant part of our meeting will focus on getting your input and feedback about the design of the GTC program.  We are currently compiling a document with our plans for the design of the GTC program that will include ways for you to share your thoughts and feedback with us both in Salt Lake City and beyond. We do not expect you to review this prior to the Roundtable.

In mid-November, we will send you the program design document, the agenda, and our objectives.  

Conversations about Evidence-Based Practices

We are pleased that Peter Brown, the principal author of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, will join us in Salt Lake City. As the CATIE Center began the development of the GTC program with an eye to using evidence-based practices, we met with Peter, who happens to live a couple of miles from St. Catherine University, to talk with him about his book and how it might guide our program. At our first coffee-shop meeting he humbly shared that he wasn’t sure what he could offer us. However, he has proved to be a great conversation partner helping us to include what science says about how we learn.

At the Roundtable, we are inviting you into that conversation. Peter will be making a brief presentation and you will have an opportunity to engage in conversation with him and colleagues about what the ideas in Make It Stick mean for interpreter education and the GTC program.   

Some of you have asked about Make It Stick and we want to provide some resources. Patty Gordon interviewed Peter and we created short videos from that conversation.

We also have ASL translations created by Janis Cole, with consultation from Betti Bonni.

If you want to read the book, it is available from Amazon for $22.38 (hardcover) or  $12.58 (Kindle). We have found it to be a very insightful and accessible resource. It is not required, as we realize that not everyone will have the time to read the book, and our meeting is structured so that everyone will have a valued role in the conversation regardless of whether they have read the book.

Roundtable Design

Finally, we want to thank Christopher Robinson who has been consulting with our team to create a more engaging and equitable process for our time together. If you are expecting a meeting where you just sit and listen to us sharing about our work and give us a rubber stamp of approval, we are afraid you will be disappointed.

Instead, we offer the words of the poet Nikki Giovanni:

It’s a journey . . . that I propose . . . I am not the guide . . . nor technical assistant . . . I will be your fellow passenger . . .

The CATIE Center is grateful you will be our “fellow passengers” on this journey as we develop the Graduation to Certification program and explore how together, we can transform interpreter education.