Keynote Speakers

Christopher Mukiibi is an educator, speaker, and founder of BrightStar Education whose work is helping schools rethink the way they understand student behavior, classroom culture, and the systems that shape both.

Chris currently teaches high school chemistry and AVID in Southern California, keeping his work grounded in the realities educators face every day. His classroom serves as the testing ground for the ideas he shares with schools, districts, and a growing national audience of educators. His online content focused on classroom behavior, regulation, and nervous-system-informed teaching has reached millions of teachers and administrators looking for practical approaches that hold up in real classrooms.

Chris is the creator of Behavior by Design (BBD), a framework developed around a central idea: behavior is not simply something to correct, reward, or punish. It is information about a student’s internal state and the environment surrounding them.

At the center of Chris’s work is a simple but important shift in perspective. When behavior problems repeatedly occur, the solution may not be asking teachers or students to simply “try harder.” Instead, schools can examine the structures, relationships, routines, and environments contributing to those behaviors.

Chris also emphasizes the role adults play in shaping school climate. His work on teacher sustainability recognizes that educators cannot continually support student regulation without also considering their own stress, capacity, and well-being. The goal is not to give educators one more initiative to implement, but to help them see behavior differently and build stronger systems around students and staff.

In addition to his keynote, Chris will host a panel discussion featuring educators from across the country, creating a conversation around the realities schools are experiencing and the strategies educators are using to strengthen behavior systems, student connection, and school climate.

Through his keynote and panel discussion, Chris will challenge educators to reconsider one of the most important questions facing schools today:

What actually works when the bell rings and students walk through the classroom door?