About Kari Arfstrom
Kari M. Arfstrom, Ph.D. is the principal of Arfstrom Educational Consulting, specializing in B2E project management, research & demographics, forecasting & trends, and flipped learning. See tabs above for more information.
Dr. Arfstrom has over two decades of experience in education with mission driven K-12 membership organizations. As a consilient thinker and serial entrepreneur, she takes the nugget of an idea to national implementation. She founded her consulting firm in 2012. Clients include technology and curriculum companies (such as TechSmith, JDL Horizons, Pearson) and associations and coalitions (such as ASCD, EdLiNC, NCTET and The Conference Board's Business & Education Council). Recently, consulted with ASCD, leading the product development efforts for professional learning programming for principals and other school leaders.
As the former Managing Director of the HVACR Workforce Development Foundation, Arfstrom led a team of research consultants, including Burning Glass Technologies, to conduct the first-ever labor analysis reports for North America. Prior to that she was the Executive Director of the Flipped Learning Network (FLN), which she co-founded in 2012 with Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams.
Prior to this she held executive leadership roles at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), the Association of Educational Service Agencies (AESA), the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), and the National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC). Before her work with these nonprofit associations, she worked for the U. S. House of Representatives. Before her teaching position at a rural high school in Minnesota, Kari was the first in-store marketing director for the then-new concept of Barnes & Noble Booksellers.
Kari was appointed in 2015 to a two-year term for the Arlington County (VA) Superintendent's Advisory Council on Technology by Superintendent Patrick Murphy. She is an advisory board member for Speak Up, which operates an annual online tech survey. She is a past board member for the Rural School and Community Trust, the National Coalition for Technology in Education and Training (NCTET), the Education and Libraries Network Coalition (EdLiNC), and the Organizations Concerned about Rural Education (OCRE). She also consulted for the Rural School and Community Trust and the National Rural Education Association (NREA).
Dr. Arfstrom has a degree in secondary education from Augsburg College in Minneapolis and is a former English/language arts/theater teacher in Minnesota with a current teaching license through 2017. Her Master’s degree is in Library and Information Science from the Catholic University in Washington, DC., an ALA accredited program. Her Ph.D., from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, is in Educational Leadership and Policy. Her dissertation was a mixed methodology national study titled: "Recognizing, Determining, and Addressing Entrepreneurial Innovations of Superintendents of Emerging or Established Educational Service Agencies." She is an adjunct professor at public and private universities and has taught both F2F and online classes.
Kari (pronounced Car-ee, not Care-ee) has completed two post-graduate Fellowships programs. Most recently at The Open University at the UK where she did research, taught and worked in elementary and secondary schools and with higher education instructors in the areas of Open Educational Resources (OER) and flipped learning. And at the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL), a nationally regarded year-long professional program.
She has a Certificate of Achievement in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston, and a member of and contributor of the World Future Society.
Linked In Profile.
