The paradox of Meaningful and Manageable...

One of the things that attracted me most to standards-based assessment was its emphasis on clearly articulated learning goals. The idea that a student should be able to work towards mastery in a content area, skill set - or both - spoke to me personally as well as professionally. And yet I struggle everyday with implementing a mastery learning approach in a way that's personal and individualized; meaningful and efficient. And therein lies the rub: There just doesn't seem to be enough hours for communicating with students about the learning and growth I'm trying to promote.

I'm having great fun working in the Cloud with students as a way of trying to encourage collaboration, provide meaningful feedback on student products, and be more efficient towards those ends. But I've found that the learning curve is steep re: inconveniencing electrons compared to pushing papers. The greatest challenge here is how to keep the work organized in the Cloud - especially the conventions related to naming and sharing files. Thanks to the students themselves -  and some very clever colleagues who are pushing this envelope as well - I'm learning and the students are learning and our collaborative effort to get organized is beginning to pay off. Hopefully this will mean more timely feedback for students.

While the Cloud means not having to collect, carry, and return papers, which is good for me and the students, it also means more time on each individual piece of student work. But lately I'm discovering that may not be the greatest thing after all.

Previously the amount of time that I would spend writing feedback on student products would be limited by the amount of space I had in the margins of their work and the stamina I could muster to cram handwritten comments in those marginal spaces. With the Cloud-based editing and commenting tools available I'm "freed" to make comments as long as necessary to bring the student work to the context of the standards.

So now I'm taking three, five, seven or more minutes with a student product trying to make comments that mean something. Comments that connect the product to the standards beyond just tacking on a number. In mathematical terms it means that a class of 25 can easily take more than two hours to evaluate. Figure that across five classes and there's not enough planning time at school - or peace and quiet at home (unless I work when everyone's sleeping) - to even begin to think it's a sustainable way of providing worthwhile formative experiences for students.

So how can I do what I need to do - what I want to do - which is give students meaningful formative feedback on their knowledge and understanding, investigating, critical thinking, and communicating in a timely way?

Any ideas out there? I'm all ears!