Since its founding at the Stanford d.school, Wayfinder has been committed to helping schools become sites of meaningful learning and development. We ground our lessons in decades of educational, neurological, and developmental research and use human-centered design to create learning experiences and curriculum around the needs of today’s students and educators.
"Schools exist to help young people identify their purposes in life and to gain the skills they need to pursue those purposes…Wayfinder is an effective partner in this important work." —Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk
Research on education and the future workforce suggests a four-pronged approach for designing curriculum that boosts social-emotional learning and enhances students’ employable skills:
- Take an asset-based approach to support young people to identify their strengths and analyze the ways these strengths could serve them in different fields and professions
- Help students develop explicit social-emotional skills. These are important for employability—especially for those positions being created and transformed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution
- Incorporate trauma-informed practices to make learning accessible to all students
- Engage students in discussions about the real-world challenges that await them in professional fields like STEM
This research echoes the approach Wayfinder’s curriculum designers use to ideate, plan, and create all of our social-emotional learning curriculum. Built around uplifting students’ strengths and bolstered by Universal Design for Learning to support trauma-informed implementation, our Foundations, Belonging, and Purpose curricula empower K-12 students to embrace their potential and grow toward self-actualization. As students learn about themselves, explore community engagement, and move toward purposeful action, they develop the skills and competencies that support them to flourish in school, the workforce, and beyond.
Download our full white paper - Putting SEL to Work - to learn more about how SEL and Wayfinder are helping students thrive personally, achieve academically, and build the skills employers are looking for.
