Toward Meaningful Learning: How Wayfinder Helps Students Find Purpose

A review of Wayfinder by Garreth Heidt, English + Innovation Lab Teacher at Perkiomen Valley School District.

“If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.”
–Joseph Campbell 

For as long as I’ve been teaching, schools have sought to “help” students towards successful futures by designing “career pathways” and “tracks” to make their trek through the dark forests of the future safer and to minimize their missteps. These pathways are indeed well-intentioned, and for the most part offer a modicum of guidance. But they also create the illusion that life itself is filled with easily recognizable pathways to help us move simply and in clear steps from one stage of life to another. 

If 30+ years in the classroom and almost double that on this earth has taught me anything, it is that life is rarely an easily navigable, defined path through a mildly thrilling forest. No… life is more like a thrilling, dangerous, rewarding journey across a wide open ocean, on a tiny boat, with (if you’re lucky) a skeleton crew.

We probably all know young people—perhaps we could even point to ourselves—who were on the pathway, followed all the rules, and still wound up in a place entirely different than where the path was leading. Many of them are unhappy, unfulfilled, struggling, and wondering how they strayed so far off the path to “success.” 

To put it another way… many seem adrift at sea, lacking not only an understanding of how to proceed but also a larger purpose. And as many studies have shown, without purpose, our lives are not nearly as fulfilling and meaningful as they could be. 

Thus, the metaphor of neatly worn pathways with known waypoints along the way may be the wrong kind of metaphor for a world that is as “volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous” as ours currently seems to be. 

So if 12+ years of school and numerous pathways haven’t prepared them to confidently navigate their way to productive and purposeful futures, what needs to change for them to do so?

That’s the question that the founders of Wayfinder asked themselves almost a decade ago as they looked back on their own educations. And, in a nod to both Joseph Campbell and the genius of Polynesian Wayfinders, they’ve changed the metaphor. In doing so, they have created and evolved one of the most useful, brave, and honest pieces of curriculum I’ve come across in all my years. 

Instead of pathways with defined beginnings and ends, Wayfinder’s high school Purposeful Leadership curriculum sketches out a 28-lesson journey during which students come to understand the benefits of their life experiences, intuitions, their friends and family, and their own joy and sense of purpose as tools to help them become productive, purposeful navigators on the deep and endless seas of their futures. In doing so, the curriculum empowers them to create projects that help them reshape their own experiences of learning and grow into more expansive understandings of what it means to be successful.

The project divides its lessons into five distinct but interrelated sections: 

1. Wayfinder Mindsets leads students to reimagine the journey they are on, helping them understand who is journeying with them, rethink what success means, divine the deeper meaning of the wayfinding metaphor, and learn just how important they are to each other.
2. Self Discovery helps students understand what is personally meaningful to them. Through experiential activities in mapping out their current life journeys to better understand their “story,” to capturing their strengths, to understanding the immense importance of their own, often unexplored values systems, this section employs deep self-reflection with small group work that not only further strengthens the class community but helps students understand just how commonly uncommon they each are.
3. Beyond the Self provides experiences in coming to understand what matters outside of our own often narrow perspectives. Understanding the impact of our actions on others and the world, coming to better understand the importance of empathy, and finding their own north stars helps students feel not only less alone on the vast ocean of their futures but to gather strength from the knowledge that others are on this journey with them. 
4. Step into Life With Purpose is a series of five experiences that help students reimagine their future. Here, students learn the importance of purpose in their lives and how living lives of purpose, where their actions are personally meaningful and consequential to a larger community, brings meaning and direction into life.
5. Supporting Tools augments the project's already burgeoning “How to Navigate Life toolkit” by making students aware of just how important their emotions, friends, and gratitude are on their journey. 

While I have countless examples of the impact this curriculum has had on me, it’s the words of the students that ring most clearly:

“The idea of living beyond the simplicity of schoolwork and the all-too-familiar monotony of the workweek has been planted in our minds. The only way to really have direction in one’s life is to define what makes us tick—our purpose(s) and how we want to leave our mark. Wayfinder has done this for me.”
–Ethan F.

“I think Wayfinder should be applied wherever it can: other classes, other schools, workspaces. After all, there is never a wrong time or place to find your North Star.”
–Valencia C.

“Wayfinder helps us succeed in the world rather than merely in the classroom. It shows us that no matter how different we are and how separated we are that we have a purpose and that our purpose is consequential to the world.”
–Nicholette D.

“Instead of trying to give us a book as a surefire method to find our purpose, they use the best tool available to anyone, other people. After all, humans aren’t meant to constantly spit out correct answers and know ourselves perfectly; we find ourselves through the stories we tell and the people we tell them to.”
–Miles C.

A social-emotional curriculum at heart, Wayfinder goes far beyond most such curricula by providing students with a deep understanding of how being in touch with oneself and one’s community is, perhaps, the most important knowledge a confident wayfinder possesses. And given the uncertainty of a “time between worlds” (as philosopher Zak Stein puts it), there is little knowledge more valuable than self-knowledge when it comes to understanding and working with others to reshape the world to the benefit of ourselves and all species on the planet. 

Each lesson is planned in an organized, deeply researched manner and provided in short and long forms. Each is accompanied by slides and links to supporting documentation so a teacher can, in a half-hour of preparation, feel confident and connected to the lesson content and goals. 

Wayfinder also has a unique and extensive digital library of activities that can be used in concert with each lesson or on their own. These digital activities are easily accessible and organized in several different ways on the Wayfinder website. Many schools use these activities in conjunction with a weekly “Wayfinder Waypoints” survey—a sort of quick, 5-question weekly SEL check-in that helps teachers, students, and the class build stronger self-knowledge and community ties.

I have worked with and used the Wayfinder curricula since 2018. What has impressed me most is the continuous growth and evolution of the lessons and organization of the curricula. While the consumable books are highly functional, each is also a keepsake—a ship’s log, if you will—that will reward revisiting over the course of one’s lifetime. Learning how to create a journey map, how to take stock of one’s values, and how to understand our impact on each other and the world are lessons that will carry across the waters of our futures and which reward us every time we revisit them.

About the Author

Garreth Heidt is a seasoned educator with 30+ years of experience, currently teaching English and innovation classes at Perkiomen Valley High School. He is the co-creator of inNOVAtion Lab, a course that empowers students to explore innovation and entrepreneurship through design thinking. With a rich background in middle school humanities, Garreth has been instrumental in designing educational experiences, including partnerships with community institutions like Ursinus College's Berman Museum of Art. A former lead faculty mentor for Perkiomen Valley Retrobotics and co-founder of the school's Esports team, Garreth coached the Speech and Debate team for 22 years. His specialties include curriculum development, public speaking, and design-based educational methods. He also serves on the board of directors for the Touchstones Discussion Project and is the Director of Learning for the educational design consultancy, Form & Faculty.

You can learn more about the Purposeful Leadership course for high school students here.