'Unconference' fosters collaboration among Penn State student success professionals

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Education recently hosted the second annual Student Success Unconference, co-sponsored by the College of Education’s Journey Success Center and the Chaiken Center for Student Success in the College of the Liberal Arts.

This year’s event — which aimed to share insight and knowledge among student success professionals — was fully hybrid in order to wholly include those from Penn State campuses who serve undergraduate students throughout Pennsylvania.

“One thing we were deliberate about this year was making sure that Commonwealth Campus professionals weren’t just invited, but fully recognized and able to contribute,” said Kevin Hulburt, director of Journey Success Center. “The experience of supporting students at Hazleton or Schuylkill or Berks, for example, is not the same as at University Park, and that knowledge is vital to the larger conversation of what student success is and how to achieve it.”

Ninety people attended in person at Chambers Building on the University Park campus while another 61 joined virtually. Attendees represented 20 of the 21 Penn State locations that serve undergraduates, including World Campus, 11 of the 13 undergraduate-serving academic colleges, and Student Affairs.

Attendees came from several student service disciplines, including academic advising, student success centers, coaching programs, faculty, learning centers, tutorial services, career services, administration, enrollment management, financial aid, student affairs, student engagement, diversity and belonging offices, global engagement and international programs, University Libraries, disability resources, and institutional research and planning.

“Student success at Penn State is not the work of any one office, any one campus, or any one college,” Hulburt said. “It’s what happens when all of us — advisers, counselors, coaches, faculty, career staff, and so many others — are genuinely collaborating to help our students flourish and thrive.”

An “unconference” is a participant-driven professional learning format where the expertise is already in the room. Rather than organizing sessions around individual speakers or pre-determined presentations, attendees co-create the agenda — bringing their own experience, challenges and questions to shape the conversations that take place.

This year’s event was inspired by the EdCamp model, a peer-driven professional development format that originated in K–12 education. Participants were asked to come ready to share from their expertise and experience, listen and learn from their colleagues, and collaborate in new ways to address shared challenges.

The morning welcome keynote was framed around a systems/ecosystem lens for student success, including perspectives from colleagues at the Commonwealth Campuses. During the day, there were three 75-minute breakout sessions with simultaneous rooms (in-person and virtual) and shared physical and digital note-capture tools across every room to aggregate ideas from all the conversations for the student success professional community. Participants selected from 22 breakout session topics developed from pre-event input.

Some of the topics included:

• Connecting the ecosystem: building structures and relationships that make cross-unit and cross-campus collaboration stick
• Belonging as an institutional outcome: creating conditions where every student feels they belong
• Supporting students through campus transitions, change-of-campus processes, and Penn State's evolving system landscape
• First-generation student success: what works and what needs to change
• Advising standards and the relational foundation of student success
• Peer coaching and mentoring: scaling what works
• Supporting neurodiverse students
• Proactive outreach and data-informed student support
• Mental health and basic needs: bridging counseling and student success services
• Career readiness and integrating career development into the student success ecosystem
• Supporting multilingual and international students
• The role of AI (artificial intelligence) and technology in advising and student support

“The expertise on the topic of student success is distributed across Penn State professionals,” Hulburt said. “Our job was to create conditions where people could actually share that expertise and collaborate with each other. That’s what an unconference does. It creates a system to connect across the ecosystem of student success supports.”