In the traditional education landscape, it is not uncommon for a student to take general education requirements and then move onto more specialized courses where they can exert a bit more autonomy and freedom on the content. In this model, students are given task after task to overcome in the pursuit of meeting all of the graduation requirements for a diploma. Simultaneously, and being made far less a priority, society asks these students to make decisions regarding vocation and career in and amongst the issues of meeting scholastic requirements. Dr. Michelle Jones decided that this model was backward – that the student should greatly consider where they want to go with their lives first and then set that as a context for making the right educational and professional choices. To that end, she founded Wayfinding Academy – a two-year not-for-profit school in Portland, Oregon whose number one goal is helping students find a path in life. It’s there where students are starting a new venture and using their education to their own advantage and tailoring it to the life that they want.

GUEST BIOGRAPHY

Michelle is doing her life’s work right now, which is exhilarating and terrifying. During her 15 years teaching Leadership and Organizational Behavior courses in the traditional college system, she had a front-row seat for what is broken about that system. About 5 years ago, she began gathering a group of like-minded badasses around a vision of what a revolution in higher education could look like. After years of helping groups and non-profits organize for social impact as a volunteer (SuperThank, TEDxMtHood, World Domination Summit), Michelle started her legacy project and the Wayfinding Academy was born.

You can watch her recent TEDx talk here.

SHOW NOTES

3:00 – Michelle tells us a little about the path to getting Wayfinding Academy from its inception to now.

5:30 – Do student “find their way” at Wayfinding or do they graduate thinking that this is going to be a lifelong process?

8:40 – Have you found a formula that helps students have that “A-HA” moment?

11:40 – Are you trying to answer the question of “what do you want to do with your life” or “what do you want to be when you grow up” or are you asking a different question?

15:26 – Are you trying to answer a different question than your students when they get there?

17:22 – What’s the best question you’ve heard a student ask regarding their own process of self-discovery?

22:14 – How much does faith and belief come into the conversations that happen on campus?

25:30 – How much weight do you put on computerized assessments in self-discovery – if you use them?

27:56 – What should be the focus of a college course – be it English 101 at a traditional school or Wayfinding 101 which you teach at Wayfinding Academy?

32:11 – Is the current state of higher education predicated on the idea that most people already know what they want to do before they get there (as they have historically)?

28:03 – If a student has very lofty expectations for their career, do you counsel them to have a plan B if they should have a plan B?

36:24 – How can someone get in touch with Wayfinding Academy if they want more information or would like to apply?

40:29 – If you had your druthers,