Best Should Teach Keynote Speakers
For over 20 years, the has included a keynote presentation from a distinguishedinvited educator.
2025-2026
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Mollie Blackburn
In 2026, we welcome Dr. Mollie Blackburn, a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning within the College of Education and Human Ecology.
(For)Giving in Moving Across Differences
Based on a teacher research project conducted in an LGBTQ+-themed literature course in a queer friendly high school, this talk explores how students and teacher moved across differences by troubling the notion of forgiveness and embracing the act of giving. The goal of this movement was to share ethical encounters, where we were, at least sometimes, open, vulnerable, responsible, and responsive.
2025
Alphonse Keasley served as our 2024–2025 Best Should Teach keynote speaker, delivering an inspiring address titled Turning Hindsight into Foresight: Lessons in Leadership, Inclusion, and Transformative Education. Drawing on more than 30 years of service at 鶹ѰBoulder, Keasley reflected on the power of inclusive teaching, community engagement, and high-impact practices to shape meaningful educational experiences—past, present, and future.
2024
Kevin Gannon's talk, Is It Time to Change Your Mind?, covered how might we (re)connect with our agency, and use it to anchor our practices in an ethic of hope. This talk suggested specific places to start, and offered strategies to identify and critique the assumptions we bring to teaching. Kevin Gannon is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence and Professor of History at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.
2022-2023
What to do when you don’t know what to do: Teaching for equity and justice on days after.
Dr. Alyssa Hadley Dunn,Director of Teacher Education for the Neag School of Education and an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction
2021
This Best Should Teach awards ceremonyincluded 2020and 2021awardees. The ceremony wasinvitation onlyto minimize contact. Awardees took turns speaking at the event as they received their awards. There was no guest speaker for this event.
2020
In 2020, the Best Should Teach awards ceremony was postponeddue to the COVID-19 global pandemic.
2019
We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
Bettina L. Love, Associate Professor of Educational Theory & Practice, the University of Georgia
2018
Habits of the Mind: Global Approaches to Teaching and Learning
Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University
2017
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Classroom
Thomas Cech, Nobel Laureate, Distinguished Professor, and Director of CU's BioFrontiers Institute, 鶹Ѱ
2016
Using the Tools of Critical Race Theory and Racial Microaggressions to Examine Everyday Racism in and out of the Classroom
Daniel Solórzano, Professor of Social Science & Comparative Education, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
2015
The Republic of Imagination: Humanities & the Future of Democracies
Azar Nafisi, Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University
2014
The Best Should Research Teaching: Impacts of Physics Education Research
Steven Pollock, Professor, Physics; Carnegie Professor of the Year
2013
One Big Sandbox
Elisa Villanueva Beard, Co-CEO, Teach for America
2012
“Getting Serious” About Education: Cultivating CulturallyRelevant Teachers for New Century Students
Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison
2011
The Best Should Teach Legacy
Philip P. DiStefano, Chancellor, 鶹Ѱ
2010
Science and the World’s Future
Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Chief, Science magazine
2009
The Pedagogical Imagination: Teaching toward Possibility
Kris Gutiérrez, Provost’s Chair, School of Education
2008
Why the Best Should Teach: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility
Donna Dickenson, Emeritus Professor, Medical Ethics and Humanities, University of London
2007
Save the World on Your Own Time
Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law,College of Law, Florida International University
2006
The Role of Teaching in Countering Social Inequality
Pedro Noguera, Professor, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University & Director, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education
2005
Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science (and a Lot of Other Subjects)
Carl Weiman, Professor, Physics
2004
The Less Teaching, the More Learning, and Other Lessons from the Radical Past
Martin Bickman, Professor, English, CU-Boulder
2003
Twins Separated at Birth: the Reunion of the Sciences and the Humanities
Patricia Limerick, Professor, History & Environmental Studies and Chair of the Board & Faculty Director for the Center of the American West
2002
A New Faculty for the New American Century: Challenges and Opportunities
Orlando Taylor, Dean of the Graduate School, Howard University
2001
Teaching Science in the 21st Century
Margaret Murnane, Professor, Physics
2000
Teaching Because Democracy Matters
Walter Parker, University of Washington
1999
Where Love & Need Are One: A New Day for Teaching
Eugene Rice, Director for the Forum on Faculty Roles & Rewards, American Association for Higher Education