How three thinkers combine to create learning tailored to each individual
Wayfinder starts from the learner and asks: who is this person, how do they think, what are they ready for, and what kind of conversation will help them grow? The content adapts to the learner — not the other way around.
Most educational technology starts from the content and asks: how do we deliver this material efficiently? The content is fixed; the learner is expected to adapt to it. If the learner fails, the system offers the same material again — perhaps more slowly or in smaller pieces, but fundamentally unchanged.
Wayfinder starts from the opposite end. It starts from the learner and asks: who is this person, how do they think, what are they ready for, and what kind of conversation will help them grow?
This is not a slogan. It is a specific, theoretically grounded design drawing on three decades of independent research by three thinkers whose work, taken together, provides something none of them achieved alone.
Each thinker contributes something essential and distinct. Pask provides the how. Jaques provides the what. Stamp provides the with.
How understanding actually works — the mechanism by which a person comes to genuinely know something, not just recall it. Conversation Theory. Teachback. Entailment meshes. Learning strategies.
What cognitive development looks like — the structural stages through which a person's capacity to handle complexity grows over a lifetime. Four orders of information complexity.
How to see where a person currently stands — an appreciative method for detecting cognitive capability without reducing the person to a test score.
Pask spent thirty years investigating a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to understand something? His answer overturns most of what educational technology assumes.
You do not understand something because someone explained it to you. You understand it when you can explain it yourself — when you can derive it, build a model of it, and teach it back to someone else. This is not a higher standard of assessment bolted on after learning. It is what learning is. Pask called this teachback, and it is the assessment method at the heart of Wayfinder.
Some learners work sequentially — step by step, mastering each piece before moving on. Pask called these serialists. Others scan broadly for patterns and overarching structures. Pask called these holists. The most capable learners — the versatile — can adopt either strategy as needed. When teaching matches strategy, outcomes improve dramatically. When mismatched, learning deteriorates — serialists become Improvident (fixating without context), holists become Globetrotters (connecting without explaining).
Knowledge organised as a one-way chain can be memorised but not genuinely understood. Knowledge organised as a cyclic network — where every idea can be reached from every other through derivation, with analogies made explicit — is genuinely learnable. The learner can enter from any point, work in any direction, and build understanding through whatever path suits them. Pask called this structure an entailment mesh.
Innovation requires holding two or more distinct perspectives simultaneously and resolving them — finding what they share, how they differ, and what new understanding encompasses both. This is not creativity in the romantic sense. It is a process with identifiable conditions that Wayfinder can encourage through specific conversational moves.
While Pask investigated the mechanisms of understanding, Jaques spent decades investigating how people's capacity to handle complexity develops over a lifetime. His framework provides the map of the developmental terrain.
The difference between handling simple and complex tasks is not intelligence or effort — it is a structural difference in how information is processed. Each order builds on the previous:
Concrete, specific information. Things, events, facts.
Collections of Order 1. Categories, groups, aggregations.
Sequences and chains. Plans, contingencies, if-then reasoning.
Multiple interacting chains simultaneously. Trade-offs across plans.
These stages manifest in observable ways — particularly in language. Order 1 uses concrete language. Order 2 collects and categorises. Order 3 uses conditional and sequential language. Order 4 holds multiple frames in tension simultaneously. Wayfinder can observe how the learner talks about material and calibrate the complexity of what it offers — stretching toward the next order, not overwhelming with one too far ahead.
Jaques was emphatic: understanding developmental stages is not for labelling people. It is for supporting development. The question is not "what level is this person?" but "what level is this person ready to grow toward, and what conditions will support that growth?"
Pask provides the conversational mechanism. Jaques provides the developmental framework. But neither tells us how to actually detect, in real time, where a particular learner currently stands. This is Stamp's contribution.
Drawing on Geoffrey Vickers's concept of appreciative systems, Stamp's methodology asks not "does this person meet our criteria?" but "how does this person see things?" Evaluation closes down (you passed or failed). Appreciation opens up (now we understand how you think, and we can work with that). Wayfinder is built on appreciation, not evaluation.
Short statements crafted at different complexity levels. The learner's natural pattern of engagement — which cards they gravitate toward, which they find meaningful, how they talk about them — reveals their current processing mode. For Wayfinder, phrase cards are tailored to each domain: a learner in cybernetics gets cybernetic phrase cards; a learner in ocean literacy gets ocean science cards. The engagement reveals not just general processing mode but the learner's relationship to this specific material.
Tasking — presenting appropriate challenges: not too easy (boredom), not too hard (overwhelm). Trusting — giving genuine freedom: letting the learner explore, construct, take unanticipated paths. Tending — ongoing support: watching for struggle, offering resources, celebrating progress. Most educational technology does tasking but neglects trusting and tending. Wayfinder does all three.
The three frameworks form their own entailment structure. Hover over any node to see how it relates to the others. Notice the colours: Pask, Jaques, Stamp, and Integration concepts that emerge from their combination.
None of these thinkers, taken alone, provides everything Wayfinder needs. Together, they provide something no existing educational technology offers: a system that can see each learner as they are, meet them where they stand, engage them in genuine conversation, adapt to how they think, and create conditions for them to discover things neither the system nor any expert anticipated.
Knowledge is organised as a cyclic network of topics connected by derivation relationships and cross-linked by analogy relations. Multiple entry points, multiple paths, multiple perspectives. Different learning strategies are accommodated because the structure is inherently flexible.
Through the pattern of exploration, the system detects learning strategy — serialist, holist, or versatile. Through engagement with topic-adapted phrase cards, it detects current processing mode — the order of complexity at which the learner naturally operates.
If serialist, it offers step-by-step derivation paths. If holist, overviews and analogies. If operating at Order 2, material that stretches toward Order 3. The conversation is genuine — the system asks the learner to explain, probes through teachback, continues until the learner can reconstruct independently.
Continuous monitoring: which topics are understood, where the learner struggles, whether strategy is producing pathology. Globetrotting is gently focused. Improvidence is gently broadened. Complexity calibration adjusts. Tasking, trusting, and tending are maintained throughout.
Through the cognitive reflector — a visualisation of the entailment mesh with progress overlaid — the learner sees their own trajectory: what they have understood, what they are aiming for, how their path compares to others, where the domain extends beyond what they have explored. The learner becomes, as Pask put it, their own teacher.
The system creates conditions for innovation — discovering connections and constructing understandings that go beyond the existing domain. Through six heuristic procedures, the system proposes contexts the learner may find productive. The domain itself evolves through the learner's engagement.
Most adaptive learning systems select from a fixed pool of content based on test performance. Wayfinder differs in five fundamental ways.
The serialist/holist distinction and Jaques processing modes are about the structure of thinking, not the amount of knowledge. Two learners with identical facts may need completely different conversational approaches.
Teachback is not a test with right and wrong answers. It is a conversation in which the learner demonstrates understanding by explaining, deriving, and constructing. Phrase cards are not a quiz — they are a structured conversation. The learner does not feel tested. They feel engaged.
The system tracks not just whether the learner has covered the material but whether their capacity to handle complexity is growing. The goal is not "did they learn this topic?" but "are they developing as a thinker?"
Through THOUGHTSTICKER-derived heuristics, the system supports the learner in going beyond the existing domain. This is not an add-on for advanced learners — it is built into the architecture from the beginning.
Stamp's appreciative methodology and Pask's principle of privacy in the face of agreement both insist that the learner's understanding is their own. The system supports construction, not imposition. It respects the result as genuinely theirs.
A guide knows the destination and leads you there. A tutor knows the material and instructs you in it. A wayfinder does something different: it helps you find your own way through territory that may be only partly known, toward destinations that may not yet be defined.
Wayfinder does not assume that the system knows where the learner should end up. It provides a structured domain of knowledge, a set of conversational tools, an attentive partner that sees how the learner thinks and adapts accordingly, and the conditions under which genuine understanding and innovation can emerge. Where the learner goes with all of this is the learner's own journey.
A vehicle for driving through knowledge
The driver chooses the destination and the route. The vehicle does not determine where to go. But a good vehicle makes journeys possible that would be impossible on foot, and a great vehicle extends the driver's capabilities so fundamentally that the driver becomes someone different through the experience of driving it.
That is the intent. Three thinkers, thirty years of independent research each, combined into a platform that sees each learner as they are, meets them where they stand, and supports them in becoming more than they were.