Arleen Arnsparger, a nationally recognized community college student success expert, will speak to MCC faculty and staff and will moderate an MCC student panel discussion as part of MCC Faculty Seminar Days on Thursday morning, Aug. 23.
Both hour-long events in Collegiate Hall are sponsored by MCC’s Achieving the Dream (AtD) initiative and open only to MCC faculty and staff.
The panel discussion, titled “The Faculty’s Role in Student Engagements,” begins at 10:10 a.m. Then, at 11:05 a.m., Arnsparger will be joined by her husband, John D. Cooper, Ph.D., a former Michigan community college vice president, dean and director, for her talk on “How Professional Development Improves Success.”
“We devote a lot of time and energy talking about students, so we wanted to hear from our students,” said Jennifer Klingenberg, an MCC instructor and co-chair of the college’s AtD Team, about holding a student panel discussion. As the moderator, Arnsparger hopes to elicit some helpful insights into the current MCC student experience.
The exchange of ideas will augment MCC’s keen focus on student success and retention that began with the AtD initiative and has continued as a priority under Vice President for Student Services John Selmon, said Kelley Conrad, MCC counselor and AtD co-chair
As project manager of the Initiative on Student Success at the Center for Community College Student Engagement at The University of Texas, Arnsparger works with community colleges throughout the country, conducting focus groups and interviews with students to learn about their college experiences, interviewing presidents, and listening to faculty and staff.
The former broadcast media reporter worked as an administrator at community colleges in New York and Colorado; an adjunct faculty member; and as an education policy advisor and senior management team member at the Education Commission of the States, working with governors, state leaders, higher education systems and school districts throughout the country on education improvement.
Arnsparger writes and speaks internationally about how to bridge generational differences in the workplace. She is the co-author of the books Millennials@Work and 4genR8tns: Succeeding with Colleagues, Cohorts & Customers.