I had the pleasure of hosting last week's insightful Awakin Call with Patrick Cook-Deegan, expertly moderated by Aryae! Patrick is an educator, speaker, and wilderness guide focused on helping young people live more meaningful lives.
At Stanford’s Design School, Patrick launched and now independently directs Project Wayfinder, which seeks to inspire our next generation to become intentional meaning-makers empowered to contribute to the world around them. Project Wayfinder works with high schools, offering kits and educator workshops to help equip students with the skills, knowledge and confidence to become purposeful navigators of their lives and the world. It also offers summer institutes at leading universities for high school educators, to equip them to lead students on the Wayfinder Journey and reflect on their own paths as wayfinders. The term “wayfinding” comes from an ancient, natural system of navigation used by Polynesians to voyage thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean.

Patrick also writes and speaks about boldly re-designing the American high school for the 21st century, drawing on neuroscience, purpose learning and human-centered design.

A few wisdom nuggets from our call:

• Purpose is something meaningful to self and consequential for the world (i.e., it is pro-social or compassionate). It brings together our internal and external lives.

• According to neuroscience research, thinking in metaphors is helpful for learning. Navigating life is like navigating in a wilderness or on the ocean – it is not a straight line. And yet modern high school is designed to be a straight line (students are rewarded for being compliant and checking off boxes). We’re entering an era where we no longer know the right boxes, and so students need to know how to learn what they need to learn. The metaphor of wayfinding is powerful for bringing in the idea that non-linearity in learning is ok -- and that it takes a lot more skill, persistence and perseverance to navigate in nonlinear way.

• Re-designing the high school would require overhaul of several core components. Just a few of these include: (1) fostering fundamentally different relationships between teachers and students, so that teachers no longer are content deliverers, but rather are coaches/mentor/guides that help students how to use content and how to find relevant content; (2) radically changing grading to more of an iterative grading system, where people are rewarded on how they learn from feedback, as opposed to getting one static grade; (3) radically changing the school day, which currently makes no sense for the brains and bodies of teenagers, 89% of whom are sleep deprived.

• After his first 10-day meditation retreat in 2006, Patrick described feeling – on the 7th or 8th day (after much struggle initially) – as if “someone put an industrial vacuum cleaner over my head and sucked out anger from every cell. I felt peacefulness in my whole being. This was a practice that could transform internal states in a way I could never do on my own.” Since then, Patrick said he has done a 10-day or month-long retreat every year.

• Mindfulness is a really powerful tool for understanding your own mind, but in Patrick's view it doesn't really help you figure out systematically how to take what you've learned about yourself and apply it into the world. So Patrick sought to create the Wayfinder curriculum to add that component.

• Purpose is not something that requires climbing up a mountain. It starts with doing smaller projects that feel purposeful and that grow into bigger projects. Start with something you can do – that often leads to something bigger that you couldn't have initially imagined. And when you get to a point when you are acting at your capacity and capability, then that’s enough. You’re not going to change the world, but you can do something -- and things can snowball faster than you think. So start small with something that's meaningful and purposeful to you.

We've posted the audio recording of the call, and in the coming week, we will be also be posting a transcript on that same page. You can learn more about Patrick's work via his writings on How to Help Teens Find Purpose and Seven Ways to Help High Schoolers Find Purpose. If you know of a high school or college-level teacher or instructor interested in helping young people navigate their purpose through the Wayfinder curriculum, they may wish to attend one of the 2018 Project Wayfinder summer institutes.