Hopelab continues our series featuring portfolio partners with unique approaches to centering equity and improving well-being outcomes. Wayfinder was born at Stanford d.school with the intention of reimagining education to develop a student’s sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging. Rather than recycling outdated solutions to curb student depression and anxiety, Wayfinder’s curriculum and products focus on health-related skill building that supports wellness in school, career, and throughout life.

Wayfinder has served students from over 65 countries worldwide, including major U.S. school districts such as Omaha Public Schools, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, Portland Public Schools, and The School District of Philadelphia, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of students have meaningful access to health education. Garreth Heidt, English and Innovation Lab Teacher at Perkiomen Valley School District in Pennsylvania, has used the curriculum since 2018 and calls Wayfinder, “One of the most useful, brave, and honest pieces of curriculum I’ve come across in all my years.”

Some of his students offered the following observations.

The idea of living beyond the simplicity of school work 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.

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 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 veteran teacher’s experience with Wayfinder’s curriculum

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, define the deeper meaning of the wayfinding metaphor, and learn just how important their interpersonal relationships are to their growth and development.
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 Star helps students feel less alone in the vast ocean of their futures and strengthened by 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.

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.

To read more about how Wayfinder is helping Mr. Heidt’s students find purpose, read the full article by Garreth on Wayfinder’s blog.

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.