Currently, Sackstein is the Director of Humanities (Business, English, Library, Reading, Social Studies and World Languages) in West Hempstead, New York. While in her first year of leadership, she completed her advanced leadership certification at SUNY New Paltz. Taking what she learned in classes and applying her classroom leadership to a team of teachers, Sackstein was able to start growing as a new school leader, building relationships and demonstrating the kind of leadership she would have liked from her own past administrators.

Prior to her current role, Sackstein was a Teacher Center teacher and ELA teacher at Long Island City High School in New York. She also spent nine years at World Journalism Preparatory School in Flushing, New York, as a high school English and journalism teacher where her students ran the multimedia news outlet WJPSnews.com. In 2011, the Dow Jones News Fund honored Starr as a Special Recognition Adviser, and in 2012, Education Update recognized her as an outstanding educator. In her current position, Sackstein has thrown out grades, teaching students learning isn't about numbers, but about the development of skills and the ability to articulate growth.

In 2012, Sackstein tackled National Board Certification in an effort to reflect on her practice and grow as an educational English facilitator. After a year of close examination of her work with students, she achieved the honor. She is also a certified Master Journalism Educator through the Journalism Education Association (JEA). Sackstein also served as the New York State Director to JEA from 2010-2016, helping advisers in New York enhance journalism programs.

She is the author of Teaching Mythology Exposed: Helping Teachers Create Visionary Classroom Perspective, Blogging for Educators, Teaching Students to Self-Assess: How Do I Help Students Grow as Learners?, The Power of Questioning: Opening Up the World of Student Inquiry, Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades Schooland Hacking Homework: 10 Strategies That Inspire Learning Outside of the Classroom co-written with Connie Hamilton. Most recently, Starr has published Peer Feedback in the Classroom: Empower Students to be the Experts with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). Sackstein has also contributed to compilation works in 2017 and 2018: Education Write Now edited by Jeff Zoul and Joe Mazza and “What Educators Do Differently” with Routledge. 

She blogs on Education Week Teacher at "Work in Progress" where she discusses all aspects of being a teacher and education reform. She has made the Bammy Awards finals for Secondary High School Educator in 2014 and for blogging in 2015. At speaking engagements around the world, Starr speaks about blogging, journalism education, bring your own device, and throwing out grades, which was also highlighted in a recent TedxTalk entitled “A Recovering Perfectionist’s Journey to Give up Grades.” In 2016, she was named one of ASCD's Emerging Leaders.

Balancing a busy career of writing and teaching with being Mom to 13-year-old Logan is a challenging adventure. Seeing the world through his eyes reminds her why education needs to change for every child.

Session Descriptions

Transitioning into a new role

any teacher who loves the classroom will find a difficult decision before them when trying to determine if he/she should leave the classroom. I toiled with this decision for many years, struggling to make the right choice. Now that I have, I can share my experience and offer some tips for potential new teachers

Empowering student and teacher voice

Provide audiences with different strategies and experiences that support the development of students and/or teachers in the classroom to get the most of the learning experience.

Alternative assessment for optimal student learning 

In order to truly know what students know and can do, we must create learning experiences and assessment opportunities that play to students’ strength and inspire passion and creativity in the learning environment. Topics that could be included in this are reflection, portfolio, self-assessment, student co-creation, and project-based learning.

Teacher Leadership, leading from within the classroom

As a teacher, there are many ways to lead within a building because you don’t need a title to do that. These kinds of talks would focus on ways for teachers

A Recovering Perfectionist Gives up Grading

This is the title of my TedxTalk and it aligns with the alternative assessment work, but it is mostly about rethinking the way we do grading in our classes and schools. Moving away from numbers, tests and/or letter grading and considering alternatives that speak to the complexity and nuance of student learning.

Using Tech to enhance student learning

With all of the alternative assessment, we need to consider how tech plays a role in the evolving educational landscape. Technology isn’t the only answer, but it is an important tool and resource that helps develop skills in a differentiated context. It also makes the teachers life and student communication easier.

Workshop topics

Providing feedback for optimal growth (either to teachers or to students)

This workshop focuses on teaching the tenets of excellent actionable feedback for teachers and/or students. It looks at modeling practices, using standards language and providing different ways to help people grow as learners.

Teaching students/teachers to self-assess and reflect

This workshop speaks to the nuts and bolts of student/teacher self-assessment and reflection. It helps participants understand how deeply reflection can impact learning. It touches on goal setting, progress tracking and thoughtful, standards-aligned reflection that potentially helps teachers/leaders give better feedback.

Teaching students to provide excellent peer feedback 

This workshop looks at ways to teach students to provide excellent peer feedback using a scaffolded expert group approach. Students work collaborative or independently to establish a comments bank and/or sentence stems to build expertise in particular areas for better feedback in the classroom.

Hacking Assessment - Changing the way we think about assessment for better student learning 

This is the workshop component of what I would speak about in terms of giving up grades and also looking deeply at the assessments we create. It looks at designing excellent standards alignment, reflection and success criteria as well as building projects that touch on a variety of learning styles. Student voice and choice are a huge part of this as well.

Other topics I can do workshops on:

• Blogging and professional writing
• Building a journalism program from scratch
• Growing Student Journalists in the Digital Age
• Developing a comprehensive student-centered secondary English classroom
• Co-creating curricula and success criteria with students
• Using Twitter as a backchannel for student learning 
• Promoting Literacy across content areas
• Embedding Standards for transparency and deeper student learning
• Designing Projects that Engage Students
• Building Student Blogging Communities around Independent Reading
• Portfolio Assessment 
• Bringing literature to life with immersive classroom experiences
• Writing across the curriculum