“Education speaker” covers a lot of ground. It includes the neuroscientist presenting at a national curriculum conference, the former classroom teacher making 500 school staff laugh before they cry, the Google executive who grew up in poverty and wants to talk about what learning opens up for people, and the science communicator who flew to space and came back with something to say about it. They all belong in this category. They’re not interchangeable.
This is the real challenge facing planners booking keynote speakers for education conferences, professional development events, and school district programs: the difficulty of matching the right speaker type to the specific goal your event needs to accomplish. A speaker who shifts instructional practice for a room of curriculum directors won’t necessarily land at a morale-focused all-staff PD day. A mainstage inspirational keynote that works for 3,000 educators at a state conference can fall flat for 80 school principals in a working session.
The 14 speakers below are grouped by what they help you accomplish — because that’s the question that actually matters when you’re building your program.
What separates a good education speaker from the right one
Most speaker lists for education events organize by category: science communicators, policy advocates, teacher-practitioners, motivational speakers. The problem with that framework is it describes the speaker rather than your event’s need.
The more useful question is: what does your audience need to walk away with? Inspiration and energy are one outcome. A shifted mindset about instructional practice is another. A renewed sense of purpose for teachers running on fumes is a third. Making the case to a board or a legislature for STEM investment is a fourth. Each of those outcomes calls for a different speaker profile, and confusing them leads to keynotes that technically happened but didn’t move anything.
Our educator professional development speaker roster includes practitioners, policy advocates, scientists, and school culture experts across a wide fee range. The sections below pull from that roster with one goal: giving you enough profile depth to build a real shortlist.
Speakers who make the case for STEM, for education, and for what school can do
These speakers work best on a large stage with a broad audience. They’re science communicators, education advocates, and technology insiders whose personal stories and cultural credibility make the argument for why education and STEM investment matter. If your event needs to inspire and reframe before it can teach anything, start here.
Emily Calandrelli
Emily Calandrelli became the 100th woman to travel to space on a Blue Origin flight, which is a genuinely remarkable credential. But the more useful thing for a conference audience is what she did before that: she earned degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering from West Virginia University, then two master’s degrees from MIT in Aeronautics and Astronautics and Technology and Policy, and then built a career as a science communicator rather than as an engineer.
That decision (to use her MIT training to make science accessible to everyone else) is what makes her a valuable education conference speaker. Her Netflix series “Emily’s Wonder Lab,” her Emmy-nominated work on FOX’s “Xploration Outer Space,” and her seven published books for young readers are all built on the same premise: that science is a way of thinking anyone can develop. For students, that reframe matters enormously. For educators who’ve been fighting the “I’m not a math person” response in their schools for years, it tends to land in a way that a pure-credentials keynote won’t.
She’s a particularly strong fit for STEM-focused conferences, education events with a student audience component, university programs, and science advocacy events.
Best fit: STEM education conferences, student-facing events, science advocacy summits, university programs
Bill Nye
Bill Nye is the most effective science communicator the United States has produced in the last 40 years. This is a deliberate claim. He hasn’t produced the most academic publications or held the most prestigious research title. What he’s done is make scientific literacy feel urgent and possible to a general audience for three consecutive decades, and that’s the skill that matters in a conference keynote.
His 19-time Emmy Award-winning “Bill Nye the Science Guy” introduced a generation to science through deliberate entertainment. As CEO of The Planetary Society, co-founded by Carl Sagan, he’s spent the years since making the case for space exploration, climate science, evolution, and evidence-based policy. His three New York Times bestselling books extend that work into print. When he walks onto a stage, he arrives with cultural recognition that conference organizers can’t manufacture.
His keynotes include “Ask the Science Guy,” “An Evening with Bill Nye,” and “Bill Nye the Science Guy’s Big Blast of Science.” They’re designed for large-audience events where the goal is reaching across demographics with a message about why science matters. He’s built for the moments when you want scientific literacy to feel like a cause rather than a curriculum standard.
Best fit: Large education conferences, university commencements, science education summits, climate and STEM advocacy events
Joe Sanfelippo
Dr. Joe Sanfelippo spent 26 years in education, the last 12 as superintendent of the Fall Creek School District in Wisconsin — a small rural district he helped transform into a nationally recognized model for innovative leadership. The U.S. Department of Education named him a Future Ready Superintendent and a Personalized Learning Leader Superintendent. Education Dive named him National Superintendent of the Year in 2019.
His speaking is grounded in what he actually built at Fall Creek: a culture where teachers felt trusted to lead, where students were known as individuals, and where community connection was a deliberate practice rather than an afterthought. His keynotes — including “Hacking Leadership,” “Lead Where You Are,” and “The Impact of 30 Second Moments” — give school leaders specific, replicable moves rather than aspirational frameworks they can’t operationalize. His bestseller “Hacking Leadership: 10 Ways Great Leaders Inspire Learning That Teachers, Students, and Parents Love” has become a touchstone for school leaders building cultures where teachers want to stay.
What sets him apart from most education leadership speakers is practitioner credibility. This isn’t theory imported from outside schools — it’s what he built over a decade in a real district with real constraints. For district leadership events, principal and administrator conferences, and professional development programs focused on culture and retention, that specificity lands differently than it does coming from a consultant who’s never run a district.
Best fit: District leadership events, principal and administrator conferences, school culture and retention-focused PD, education innovation summits
Browse our STEM education advocate speakers for more options in this category.
Speakers who change what happens in classrooms
These speakers are practitioners. They’ve been inside classrooms, in administrator roles, or in the research weeds of how students actually learn. Their audiences are teachers, instructional coaches, curriculum directors, and principals who need frameworks they can use in September, not inspiration to get them through the summer. These speakers work on the practice side of that gap.
Jon Bergmann
Jon Bergmann has been an educator since 1986. He received the 2002 Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching and serves on the TED-Education Advisory Board. He’s written 10 books, including the bestselling “Flip Your Classroom,” translated into 10 languages and guiding flipped learning implementations across Argentina, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, China, Korea, the Middle East, Iceland, and more than a dozen other countries.
His current keynote portfolio addresses something most education technology speakers haven’t thought hard about: what happens to students’ cognitive development when AI removes the friction from learning. His talk “AI Stupefaction: Protecting Cognitive Fitness in the Age of the ‘Easy Button'” makes a pedagogically grounded argument about how outsourcing cognitive tasks affects the development of critical thinking. “Stupefied or Supercharged? Navigating the AI Bifurcation” examines how the same technology produces different outcomes for novice vs. expert learners.
These topics are ones that most AI keynote speakers (who tend to come from business and technology backgrounds) can’t address with the same depth. Bergmann brings 40 years of classroom perspective to a conversation usually dominated by people who’ve never taught a 13-year-old. That produces a qualitatively different keynote for instructional technology conferences and teacher professional development events.
Best fit: Teacher professional development, instructional technology conferences, curriculum innovation events, district-level PD
Robyn Jackson
Robyn Jackson holds a doctorate in education policy, has published 13 books including the award-winning “Never Work Harder Than Your Students” and the international bestseller “Never Underestimate Your Teachers,” and hosts the weekly podcast “School Leadership Reimagined.” As CEO of Mindsteps® Inc., she’s helped school leaders in districts across the country implement what she calls the Buildership® Model.
The Buildership® framework matters because it’s specific. It gives principals and superintendents a four-part structure for building schools where all students succeed, without requiring them to accept a vague aspirational framework they can’t operationalize. Jackson’s keynotes, including “How to Help Every Teacher Grow One Level, in One Domain, in One Year or Less” and “Is Success for Every Child Really Possible?”, are built around this framework. They’re designed for practitioners who’ve been through enough professional development to be skeptical of promises that don’t come with implementation logic.
She also runs Buildership® University, which means her work doesn’t end at the conference. For district leadership teams that want to continue the work after the keynote, that pathway matters.
Best fit: Principal and administrator conferences, curriculum director events, district leadership training, education leadership organizations
Dr. Zaretta Hammond
Dr. Zaretta Hammond spent years as a high school and community college expository writing instructor before pivoting to research and consulting in culturally responsive teaching. Her book “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students” has become a foundational text in equity-focused educator professional development. She sits on the research advisory committees for Learning Policy’s Science of Learning and Development Alliance and the Consortium for Reading Education.
What distinguishes her from other equity-focused education speakers is the neuroscience layer. Her primary keynote, “How Culturally Responsive Teaching Can Accelerate Academic Achievement,” presents the cognitive science of how students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds learn, and where most classroom instruction misses them. That combination of moral clarity and instructional specificity produces change rather than just agreement.
She’s particularly effective at events where the audience has already accepted the equity goal but doesn’t know what to do differently on Monday. That’s a large and underserved population in education professional development. For districts in active equity-focused curriculum work, she pairs naturally with Dr. Sharroky Hollie for a two-keynote sequence that addresses both the why and the how.
Best fit: District curriculum conferences, equity-focused educator events, literacy and instructional coaching events, state-level education conferences
Our early childhood education speakers page includes additional options for programs focused on younger student populations.
Speakers on school culture, educator morale, and family engagement
Some of the most impactful education events don’t address instruction directly. They address the conditions that make instruction possible: whether teachers feel supported, whether school culture reinforces what educators are trying to do, whether families are partners in student success. The speakers in this section work in those spaces.
Po-Shen Loh
Po-Shen Loh is a Carnegie Mellon mathematics professor, a Hertz Fellow, and the former national coach of Team USA at the International Mathematical Olympiad — a competition he once competed in himself, earning a silver medal in 1999. He now speaks in more than 100 cities per year, which for a working academic is an unusual commitment and a signal of how seriously he takes the public-communication side of his work.
His keynote “Education in the Age of AI” asks a question most education conferences haven’t fully reckoned with: whether the way we currently teach prepares students for a world where AI handles routine cognitive tasks. His angle isn’t apocalyptic and it isn’t dismissive — it comes from someone who has spent decades thinking about how people develop mathematical reasoning, which is exactly the kind of deep thinking AI can’t replicate. For educators who need a rigorous, credible voice on AI and learning that isn’t coming from a technology company, Loh is that voice.
He also founded an EdTech social enterprise aimed at making high-quality math learning available at scale on smartphones — so the “what do we do about it” question isn’t abstract for him. For STEM education conferences, math-focused events, and education innovation summits where the audience wants intellectual rigor alongside practical perspective, he’s a distinctive option.
Best fit: STEM education conferences, math and science educator events, education innovation summits, university programs
Karen L. Mapp
Karen L. Mapp is a Professor of Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she directed the Education Policy and Management Master’s Program for 14 years (2008–2022). For more than 25 years, her research has focused on one specific question: what does it actually take to build productive partnerships between families, communities, and schools that improve student outcomes?
The research answer to that question is more specific than most family engagement professional development acknowledges. Mapp is a founding member of the District Leaders Network on Family and Community Engagement and serves on the advisory board of the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement. Her keynotes connect the research base to actionable practice for district leaders and school administrators who want to move beyond surface-level parent outreach toward something that demonstrably affects student achievement.
She’s particularly effective at superintendent summits, district leadership conferences, and state-level education policy events where the audience has the authority to make structural changes to how their systems engage families. An inspiring PD talk doesn’t move institutional policy; Mapp’s combination of Harvard research credibility and practical implementation knowledge does.
Best fit: District leadership conferences, superintendent summits, education policy events, state board conferences
More education speakers worth considering
Beyond the eight speakers profiled above, these five are worth knowing about depending on your event’s specific audience and goals.
Keith L. Brown, known as “Mr. I’M POSSIBLE,” is a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award winner who has spoken at the Kennedy Center and the Clinton Presidential Library. He overcame “Special Ed” and “at-risk” labels earlier in his life and founded the I’m Possible Institute to train speakers and leaders. His keynotes work particularly well for student-facing events and educator motivation programs where personal transformation is the goal.
Dr. Adolph Brown, known as “The World’s Greatest Edu-tainer,” was once the youngest tenured full professor in the nation. He holds degrees in Psychology and Anthropology from the College of William & Mary and brings his background as an educational and clinical psychologist to keynotes on character education, neuroscience of learning, and servant leadership in schools. His entertainment-driven delivery style makes dense content accessible; he’s well-suited for district-wide PD events that need energy alongside substance.
Weston Kieschnick is the author of “Bold School,” “The Educator’s ATLAS,” and “Breaking Bold,” and the host of “Teaching Keating,” one of the top education podcasts on iTunes. He’s a TEDx speaker who has worked with Google, Apple, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on blended learning design and has advised educators in 30+ countries. For instructional technology conferences and blended learning events, his practical approach and broad international experience are valuable.
Dr. Sharroky Hollie has more than 30 years in education and has been a visiting professor at UCLA, Stanford, and Hebrew Union College. His 2011 book “Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning” is widely used in teacher preparation programs. As noted earlier, he pairs effectively with Dr. Zaretta Hammond for equity-focused curriculum tracks, with Hollie providing the linguistic and cultural responsiveness framework and Hammond providing the neuroscience of learning layer.
Danny Brassell, known as “Jim Carrey with a Ph.D.,” has delivered more than 3,500 presentations on four continents and written 16 books on reading, motivation, and communication. His nearly three-decade career in education advising spans preschool to research institutions. For reading motivation events, literacy conferences, and educator engagement programs where high energy and humor are as important as content, he’s a consistent performer.
Thinking through your education speaker program
The most common planning challenge for education events involves asking one keynote to accomplish too much. Inspiration, instructional change, policy advocacy, and staff morale are four different outcomes. A single speaker can address one or two of them well. Programs that sequence speakers by purpose tend to land harder than programs that ask a single keynote to cover all of them.
What works in practice: a mainstage keynote that reframes and energizes (Calandrelli, Nye, or Sanfelippo for a culture and innovation angle; Po-Shen Loh for a math or STEM-focused event), followed by deeper-dive sessions where practitioners get something they can actually use (Bergmann, Jackson, Hammond). The outcome is two different audience needs addressed rather than one keynote stretched across all of them.
Speaker fees vary significantly across this group. Contact us for current availability and fee information on any speaker.
If you’re not sure which profile matches your event’s specific goal and audience, our team can help you sort through your options →. We work with schools, districts, and education organizations regularly, and the shortlisting conversation is where we tend to add the most value.
Pick one of those four program goals first. Everything flows from knowing what you’re actually trying to accomplish in the room: the speaker, the format, the fee.
Explore our full educator professional development speaker list →