Best Should Teach Keynote Speakers

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 CU Boulder, 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 ceremony included 2020 and 2021 awardees. The ceremony was invitation only to 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 postponed due 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, University of Colorado Boulder

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 Culturally Relevant Teachers for New Century Students 
Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison 

2011 
The Best Should Teach Legacy 
Philip P. DiStefano, Chancellor, University of Colorado Boulder 

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