The Power of Purpose: Helping Students Embrace Challenges with Confidence
Research shows that purposeful students are more likely to have stronger academic engagement and performance, better self-regulation, and a reduced tendency to engage in risky behaviors.
In addition, researchers suggest purposeful people generally report greater lifelong happiness, psychological wellness, resilience, hope, and overall satisfaction.
Let Wayfinder help you bring purposeful skill-building to your students! Learn more about the power of purpose below, and download free resources to help students build skills like goal-setting and healthy habit-building.
What is Purpose?
Dr. Bill Damon at the Stanford Center on Adolescence defines purpose as “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self.”
Purpose helps students move through life in a meaningful direction, where their decisions and interactions are guided by a deep connection to their values. Purposeful students are better able to navigate uncertainty and more confident to pursue their goals.
Wayfinder Impact: Supporting Purposeful Skill-Building
Wayfinder is designed to help all students develop lives of meaning and purpose—and we do.
An independent program evaluation by Stanford University’s Dr. Heather Malin shows that students who completed Wayfinder’s high school curriculum demonstrated a 150% increase in key measures of purpose.
You can read more about Wayfinder studies, evaluations, and effectiveness here.
Wayfinder Origin Story: Our CEO on Purpose
Wayfinder was born at the Stanford Institute of Design after asking one key design question: how can we reimagine adolescent education to develop a student’s sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging?
When our CEO + Founder, Patrick Cook-Deegan, taught high school students in Oakland, CA, he quickly noticed that the few character education materials available were outdated, unengaging, and irrelevant to his students. This inspired him to create his own curriculum using research on the impact of purpose on human development and well-being.
Read his article in Greater Good on helping high school students unlock the power of purpose.