Chapter One

What is the Pathfinder Project?

I have spent my life stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung. Tagore (1861-1941)

Most people have something in life they dream of accomplishing. Interestingly, some people realize their dreams, while others seem to spend their days “stringing and unstringing their instruments.” Why do some people realize their dreams and others do not? Why is it that some, maybe most people, never even try to accomplish their dreams? Is it that those who accomplish their goals believe that they will succeed if they try hard enough? Is it the belief that they have the skills and resources necessary to accomplish their dream? Is it because there is someone along the way who inspires them or encourages them to take the first step?
The Pathfinder Project is a program that is designed to help students not only identify goals that are intensely important to them, but to provide them with the skills necessary to accomplish those goals and to function successfully in life. Since students learn these skills in the context of something that is enormously important to them, they come to realize that if they are deeply committed and willing to act on their dreams, they can accomplish great things.
One question commonly asked about the Pathfinder Project is how did it receive its name? Why is it called Pathfinder? To answer this question, let’s consider what a pathfinder is. According to the dictionary, a pathfinder is “a person who makes a path, way or route through a previously unexplored or un-traveled wilderness.” When pursuing a deeply held desire to accomplish something, we forge new insights, new paths into who we are as human beings, the nature of the world around us and its meaning to us. Students who engage in the activities provided in this program are truly pathfinders in terms of their own lives – hence the name, the Pathfinder Project.
The subtitle to the Pathfinder Project is “Exploring the Power of One.” As students learn about the great accomplishments other ordinary people have made and their own potential for greatness, they confront one of the most profound awareness’s an individual can have – namely that one committed human being can effect extraordinary change for better or for worse.

The Principles on Which the Pathfinder Project Is Founded

Although there is a strong theory and research base for these principles (see Seligman, 1991; Harter, 1999; Bandura, 1997; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Covington, 1992), all four also have an intuitive ring of truth to them because most of us have experienced the principles operating in our own lives.
We have all been inspired by the actions of others. It might have been through a movie we saw, or a story we read or heard. Or it might have been through an incident we actually observed. This inspirational event, the specifics of which might not have even been related to the details of our lives, reminded us of something we wanted to accomplish. The inspirational event might also have given us the courage to try something we have always wanted to do but were hesitant to begin.
Standing on this moment of inspiration, we began to move into action, maybe for the first time in our lives. We set goals and started working toward them. As we worked on our goals we discovered a level of energy that we might have never had before. We even discovered skills and abilities we didn’t know we had. We approached problems differently. We approached decisions differently. We became aware of aspects of our personality that were new to us. Perhaps most importantly, while working on our goals we experienced a level of satisfaction and fulfillment we had not experienced previously.
As common and widely understood as this dynamic is, it is not systematically used in K-12, education as a basic structure within which students might develop skills and abilities that would otherwise lay dormant, not to mention engage them in the pursuit of goals that provide deep personal satisfaction. The purpose of the Pathfinder Project is to bring this power and potential to K–12 education.

The Structure of the Pathfinder Project

The Pathfinder Project consists of:
• A set of inspirational stories and quotes.
• A framework for a personal project.
• Activities for learning essential life skills.
These elements are depicted in more detail in Figure 1.1.

I. Inspirational Stories and Quotes
Stories are a staple of the Pathfinder Project, as they provide guidance and inspiration to spur students on to set and accomplish personal goals. A set of stories about different individuals who have accomplished unusual, and in some cases, extraordinary things are provided in Chapter 8 of this manual. These stories are about real people, some of whom have come from backgrounds similar or even identical to the students who will read their stories.
One of the purposes of presenting inspirational stories to students is to help them realize that people who have accomplished extraordinary things in their lives have followed a similar pattern of behavior. Students are presented with this pattern in the context of the first story they read. As students read additional stories, they are asked to identify how the people in these stories followed that same general pattern. This general pattern then provides the framework for students to follow as they set and pursue their own personal goals.
The inspirational stories also provide a convenient venue for teaching and reinforcing comprehension skills. These comprehension skills are taught, modeled, and reinforced. After reading a story, students are asked basic literal comprehension questions that not only help them better understand the basic message of the story, but provide them with practice in comprehension skills that can be used when they are reading other information. As most teachers know, these are the very skills necessary to doing well on the reading portion of many state tests and standardized tests.
In addition to questions that address important literal comprehension skills, questions are asked that require students to make inferences, since the answers are not explicit in the stories students read. When answering these inferential comprehension questions, students are asked to explain and justify the assumptions they are making that lead to their conclusions.
Self-analysis questions are the third type of questions students are asked within the context of each story. Here students are asked to place themselves in the same position experienced by the person in the story and to describe and explain how they might have behaved.
In addition to the inspirational stories, the Pathfinder Project also provides a series of inspirational quotes that can be used to motivate students. These are found in Chapter 9. There are over 1,000 quotations that can be used on a daily basis to help remind students of the importance of pursuing their passions and the necessary actions they must take to do so.

II. The Personal Project
The centerpiece of the Pathfinder Project is the personal project. Here students identify and gather information about something they might want to do in the future. The critical feature of the personal project is that students are intensely interested or, ideally, passionate about pursuing and achieving a particular goal. The purpose of the personal project is to help students:
• Identify a personally relevant goal they would like to achieve.
• Learn a process they might follow to achieve such a goal.
• Develop the knowledge and skills necessary to help them achieve this goal and successfully function in life.
The personal project is divided into seven phases that closely align with the general pattern underlying the inspirational stories. Each phase is facilitated by specific classroom activities guided by the teacher. These phases are described in detail in Chapter 3 of this manual and are briefly summarized below:
Phase One: Identifying a Personal Goal
This phase of the project provides students with opportunities to think about their future without the constraints of their limiting beliefs about themselves and what they can accomplish. From this perspective, students identify a future goal that they would like to pursue.
Phase Two: Eliciting Support
In this phase, students explore the importance of establishing support; how heroes, role models, and mentors can be used as support; and the importance of eliciting appropriate support. Although students begin to elicit support for their project during this phase, they continue to examine the nature of support throughout the entire project.
Phase Three: Gathering Information about Your Goal
Once students have begun to establish a circle of support, they gather information on the topic they have selected. They also construct a description of themselves in the future at a time then they have accomplished their goal. This “future possible self” description serves as a concrete target and inspiration for each students.
Phase Four: Discerning Discrepancies between Your Current and Future Self
Armed with the description of their “future possible self,” students identify the differences or “discrepancies” between where they are now and where they want to be. This phase of the project provides a concrete list of tasks and milestones that must be addressed if students are to realize their goals.
Phase Five: Creating a Plan
Based on their look into the future through the description of their future possible self and their discrepancy analysis, students create a detailed plan. This involves planning backwards. As the name implies, this is accomplished by picking a date in the future at which time students will have accomplished the goal they have established and then planning the events that will have to occur for them to reach that goal. Stated differently, they make a timeline of future activities and events working back from their look into the future.
Phase Six: Moving into Action
Up to this point in their projects students have been gathering a great deal of information and speculating about actions they will take in the future. Now, it is time for them to put their thoughts and words into action. While students at the middle school and high school levels might not be able to take major steps toward their goals, they still can take at least a “small step or two.” In this phase of the project, students do just that.
Phase Seven: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Your Actions
The final phase of the personal project requires students to examine the effectiveness of their efforts relative to the personal project. This includes an examination of the progress they have made toward their goal, an examination of lessons learned, and an evaluation of their level of proficiency in selected skills.

III. Activities for Learning Essential Skills
As students are engaged in reading the inspirational stories, they are taught literal comprehension skills, inferential comprehension skills, and self-analysis skills. As they work on their personal projects other skills can be taught and reinforced. These include:
1. Information gathering and synthesizing skills
2. Problem solving skills
3. Decision making skills
4. Imagery and memory skills
5. Critical thinking and reasoning skills
6. Skills of self-control and self-regulation
These skill areas are described in depth in Chapter 4 of this manual. Virtually all of these skills are important not just to success in school but success in life.
The first skill area – information gathering and synthesizing skills – can be directly addressed as students gather information about various aspects of their projects. That is, as they gather information about the goal they have selected, they are taught about various information sources, ways to gather information, how to take notes and record information, and how to synthesize that information.
The other five areas are addressed via the use of specific instructional activities that the teacher intersperses throughout the program. These instructional activities can be organized in a variety of ways and used to change the pace and focus of instruction.
Relative to problem solving, students are provided with a general problem-solving strategy that can be applied to real life problems. When students understand this general problem-solving process, they are asked to apply it to problems in their lives. Additionally, throughout the Pathfinder Project students are presented with engaging academic problems along with a process for addressing these problems. These academic problems are used as “sponge activities” — activities that “soak-up” dead time when students are finding it difficult to concentrate.
Decision making skills are approached in a manner similar to real life problem-solving skills. Students are presented with a generic strategy and then provided practice with real life decisions.
The imagery and memory skills that are presented to students have a variety of applications. Imagery, in and of itself, can be used to help students clarify their goals, think through the implications of their actions, test out possible courses of action and the like. The memory skills (which are based on imagery techniques) can be used by students to improve their ability to remember important information in both academic and non-academic situations. Additionally, developing expertise in memory strategies provides students with a keen awareness of the power of the human mind.
The critical thinking and reasoning skills presented to students provide them with tools for analyzing the logic of their own conclusions and those of others. They also provide students with a grounding in the many types of informal fallacies they hear and read. In this day and age of geometrically expanding access to information from the Internet and from television, critical thinking and reasoning skills might very well be the foundation skills of a democratic society.
The final skill area addressed in the Pathfinder Project involves self-control and self-regulation skills. They are presented to students under the title of “the inner game of success.” Here students are taught that their thinking and the manner in which they control their thinking has a great deal to do not only with their success in life, but their experience of life. The self-control and self-regulation skills taught to students include: the importance of inner dialogue, the nature and importance of optimistic thinking, and the importance of self-management.

How the Pathfinder Project Might be Used

The Pathfinder Project can be used in a variety of venues that include:
• A unit or course that lasts a few weeks
• A unit or course that lasts a quarter or a semester
• A language arts course that focuses on writing
• As an after school program
• As a home study course that parents and children might engage in together
Each of these venues is described in more detail in Chapter 6.
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Materials

The materials used in the Pathfinder Project include:
1. This teacher’s manual which describes how to use the program and provides all necessary instructional materials.
2. A student notebook which contains all the materials and activities students will use throughout their personal projects.
The student notebook is described in Chapter 7 of this manual.

How This Manual Is Organized

This manual includes ten more chapters. Chapter 2 describes how the inspirational stories and quotes might be used. It also explains how to teach and reinforce comprehension skills when using the stories. Chapter 3 describes the personal project in depth. Chapter 4 describes the essential life skills that can be developed throughout the Pathfinder Project. Chapter 5 describes how evaluation and grading of students might be addressed within the context of the Pathfinder Project. Chapter 6 describes the various ways the Pathfinder Project can be used. Chapter 7 describes the student notebook. Chapter 8 contains the inspirational stories along with their associated comprehension questions. Chapter 9 contains some 900 quotations and a description of how they might be used. Chapter 10 contains reproducible exercises and activities for a variety of aspects of the Pathfinder Project. Chapter 11 contains Blackline Masters for various aspects of the Pathfinder Project. In short, this manual is a comprehensive resource for the implementation of the Pathfinder Project. XXXXXXXXXXXXback to top

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Covington, M. V. (1992). Making the grade: A self-worth perspective on motivation and school reform. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.

Harter, S. (1999). The construction of self: A developmental perspective. New York: The Guilford Press.

Macrorie, K. (1988). The I-search paper. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned optimism. New York: Knopf.