10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Aug 6, 2026 · 15 min · 9 segments
The moment you put a grade on something, it stops being formative. Starr Sackstein returns for her fourth 10 Minute Teacher appearance to make assessment practical — what formative really means, what…
Starr SacksteinGuestVicki DavisHostOkay, so let's talk about four corner for a second because honestly, so I've been teaching 24 years, and I didn't learn this technique until, like, eight or nine years ago.
I love to do it with adult learners also in PDs that I do because adult learners need to learn the same way kid learners need to learn, like multimodality is not sitting and getting.
We actually have tons of different models for how you could do it, even in a math class.
Make a statement, have them think about where they belong in the room, not watching their friends and deciding where to go based on where their friends go because they do have to defend why they've gone where they have gone.
And then you have them discuss and share out, and then in some circumstances, after they hear all of the justifications, you might ask them if they wanna switch where they are in the room based on the justification of others.
I've seen English teachers use it with characterization, like you could do it by a specific kind of topic.
In science, you could do it where you're thinking about you have a question, and you're, you have like multiple choice answers around the room, like where do you find yourself in answering this question based on the data you collected in your lab? Same with math, thinking about different ways to move it around.
So it's really this, just this great kid-to-kid discussion tool where they have to first think, have a lot of conversation, and then move.
You have movement, you have the discussion, and then you could get some writing pieces out.
I've seen folks use like Post-It notes so that certain people don't monopolize conversation too, and the-
... teachers collect the Post-It notes so that once your Post-It note is collected, you can't speak again until everyone else's Post-It note.
So it, it's an easy way to collect who's done talking already and who still needs to talk in order to have that equity of voice in the classroom.
And so you combine so many different things because you can use the Post-It note example with just about any class conversation, h- helping include all the voices.
But if they know that they need to answer to be part of class that day, they will speak up, and then it, like, changes everything, and you're thinking, "Why doesn't this student speak more? They just have such good things to say." So, uh, that is an awesome strategy, and that's been around a while, hadn't it?
Okay, so let's talk about four corner for a second because honestly, so I've been teaching 24 years, and I didn't learn this technique until, like, eight or nine years ago.
I love to do it with adult learners also in PDs that I do because adult learners need to learn the same way kid learners need to learn, like multimodality is not sitting and getting.
We actually have tons of different models for how you could do it, even in a math class.
Make a statement, have them think about where they belong in the room, not watching their friends and deciding where to go based on where their friends go because they do have to defend why they've gone where they have gone.
And then you have them discuss and share out, and then in some circumstances, after they hear all of the justifications, you might ask them if they wanna switch where they are in the room based on the justification of others.
I've seen English teachers use it with characterization, like you could do it by a specific kind of topic.
In science, you could do it where you're thinking about you have a question, and you're, you have like multiple choice answers around the room, like where do you find yourself in answering this question based on the data you collected in your lab? Same with math, thinking about different ways to move it around.
So it's really this, just this great kid-to-kid discussion tool where they have to first think, have a lot of conversation, and then move.
You have movement, you have the discussion, and then you could get some writing pieces out.
I've seen folks use like Post-It notes so that certain people don't monopolize conversation too, and the-
... teachers collect the Post-It notes so that once your Post-It note is collected, you can't speak again until everyone else's Post-It note.
So it, it's an easy way to collect who's done talking already and who still needs to talk in order to have that equity of voice in the classroom.
And so you combine so many different things because you can use the Post-It note example with just about any class conversation, h- helping include all the voices.
But if they know that they need to answer to be part of class that day, they will speak up, and then it, like, changes everything, and you're thinking, "Why doesn't this student speak more? They just have such good things to say." So, uh, that is an awesome strategy, and that's been around a while, hadn't it?
Every episode on Radar is fully transcribed, speaker-labeled, and rich with metadata. Here is a taste of this one. Try Radar for free to see the rest.
3 of 4
Formative Is Assessment for Learning
Assessment can be more than measuring learning.
When Teachers Must Own Confusion
One teacher discovered her assignment problem firsthand.
The Four Corners Strategy
This classroom strategy makes every student participate.
+1 more clip · 5 min 16 sec of audio in all
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
All 4 clips — the highlight moments, each cut as its own audio, with a title and a speaker
All 9 segments — the transcript broken into labeled sections, every ad read marked
All 20 topics — jump to every other episode discussing the same subject
Every related episode — other shows Radar links to this one
No account is needed to search Radar.
