Student Success Unconference

May 12, 2026

Participants may attend in person or virtually.

In-person events will be held in the Chambers building in the College of Education at University Park, and virtual participants can attend the whole group and breakout room sessions with the support of dedicated facilitators.

Registration is now open for the 2026 Unconference. To register, fill out and submit the following form: https://forms.office.com/r/ysp4uiDkrE.

For questions, please contact Dr. Kevin Hulburt: [email protected]

What’s New with the 2026 Unconference?

“Connecting the Ecosystem: Pathways to Inclusive Student Success Across Penn State” is the theme of the 2026 Unconference

By ecosystem, we refer to the interdependent network of people, programs, services, systems, and relationships that collectively shape students’ experiences and opportunities for success. Student success work does not occur in isolation; it emerges through the connections between many different efforts across the university.

By inclusive student success, we mean both ensuring that our understanding of success reflects the experiences, strengths, and needs of all students, and creating inclusive spaces where the voices of student success professionals across Penn State are included in the design and operations of a holistic, relational, data-driven, and coherent system of student success. Our students should have a clear and relational experience of support during their time at Penn State, feeling seen, knowing who they go to, and receiving a consistent message of what student success means at Penn State.  This requires a shared effort to connect our work, align our messaging, and strengthen the pathways through which students encounter support across the Penn State ecosystem.

Expanding the Conversation Across Penn State

Penn State is a multi-campus university, and the experience and expertise of professionals across our Commonwealth Campuses are essential to understanding and strengthening student success across the institution. This year’s Unconference will expand to include the voices of these professionals by offering both in-person and virtual attendance as well as intentional design to include and elevate the voices of these professionals.

Supporting Ongoing Collaboration

One of the goals of this year’s Unconference is to support collaboration that continues beyond the event itself.
Feedback from the 2025 Student Success Unconference highlighted a strong interest among participants in maintaining connections after the gathering as they work to put ideas into action, assess their impact, and collaborate across units and campuses. In response, the 2026 Unconference is designed not only as a space for dialogue, but also as a launch point for ongoing collaborative work.

A key outcome we hope to support is the development of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) that bring together professionals working in similar areas of student success across Penn State. These PLCs will serve as action-oriented communities of practice, where colleagues can continue sharing strategies, exploring challenges, and developing approaches that strengthen student success efforts across the Penn State ecosystem.

Where appropriate, these groups may also engage with student success data specialists to explore how existing data sources can inform their work, and to identify opportunities for developing additional data and tools that could support their efforts.

How the Unconference Will Work This Year

What is an “Unconference” anyway?

An unconference is not a traditional conference. The sessions are not designed around individual speakers or panels. Instead, this intentionally designed participant-driven format invites attendees to co-create the agenda and sessions, bringing their own expertise, questions, and ideas to shape the conversations that take place.

The Penn State Unconference was inspired by the EdCamp model, which emerged from professional development in K–12 education. EdCamps seek to honor and access the knowledge and experience of the professionals working with their students every day.  Just as EdCamps harness the lived experience of K-12 educators, the Student Success Unconference draws on the deep and diverse expertise of Penn State’s student success professionals, including advisors, faculty, program leads, coaches, counselors, administrators, and staff who support students every day.

The unconference model was created after its original founders found that the value of the conversations between sessions of a traditional conference, connecting with fellow participants, was at least as valuable as what was happening in the sessions themselves.  Unconferences or EdCamps do require more active engagement from the participants but benefit from creating new connections between professionals and conversations grounded in the contexts within which they work.

You do not need to prepare a presentation ahead of time. Instead, participants come ready to share from their experience and expertise, explore new ideas, listen, and collaborate with colleagues across the Penn State community.

Emphasizing participant participation in agenda co-creation

Because the 2025 gathering was the first Student Success Unconference, last year’s breakout topics and session schedule were created together during the event itself. For the 2026 Unconference, we are building on that experience by creating the agenda before the event. In the weeks leading up to the event, participants will engage in:

• Offering topics and challenges they want to discuss at the event
• Reviewing breakout room session topics
• Selecting the sessions that meet their needs and interests

This will allow us to design breakout rooms that better reflect participant interests and help ensure strong conversations across the day.

Due to space limitations, in-person participants may not always be able to attend every breakout session they select as their first choices, though we will do our best to align room assignments with participant preferences.

Virtual participants will be able to attend any breakout session, allowing them to fully participate in the conversations.

The goal remains the same: to create meaningful, participant-driven conversations that surface promising practices and shared needs, strengthen connections across Penn State, and help advance student success across the university ecosystem.

Tentative Schedule

Register

Registration is now open for the 2026 Unconference. To register, fill out and submit the following form: https://forms.office.com/r/ysp4uiDkrE.

Participants will be able to choose in-person or virtual participation. In-person attendance will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis, while virtual participation will allow colleagues from across Penn State to join the conversation.

Registration closes April 3rd.

After April 3rd, participants will be invited to contribute ideas for breakout session topics and engage in selecting the sessions they wish to attend.

For questions, please contact:
Dr. Kevin Hulburt
Director, Journey Success Center
College of Education
Penn State University
[email protected]