Everything You Wanted to Know About Your Students' Response
to Class, But Were Afraid to Ask Inkshedding

Susan Wyche-Smith

         Teachers who attempt to create community among students often face problems that differ from those in the traditional teacher?centered classroom. Conflicts inevitably erupt when students work in groups or develop projects together outside of class, when discussions tackle controversial issues without obvious resolution, or when a class's population embodies the diversity of a subject. Such conflicts are an essential stage in the transition to methods of student?centered learning. The challenge is not to prevent such moments, but to anticipate, identify, and respond in a way that makes them educational. However, in more traditional classes, problems can also percolate until the end of the semester, then erupt when it is too late for teachers and students to make reparations: a teacher abandons an activity because one student complained (even though the rest of the class thought it successful and wanted to continue); a student believes that the teacher is making a personal reference to her in discussing a problem from the last assignment, even though it was experienced by over half the class; two groups have not grasped the purpose of their tasks, but don't want to bring their confusion up when the teacher asks.

         These situations occur because few opportunities exist for open exchange while a course is in session. The best discussion will still be tempered by students' awareness that the teacher must ultimately evaluate them and their concern about peers' reaction, and by the teacher's need to convey a sense of fairness and consistency yet protect confidential knowledge of individual students. Thus, the public forum of the classroom constrains dialogue and debate, limiting both a teacher's awareness of hidden dynamics within the class and the potential for students to learn from-and about-one another.

         For several years now, I have been encouraging teachers who face these problems to use inkshedding, a simple method for gauging the response of students to such things as presentations, course materials, group activities, and discussions. Developed by James Reither and his colleagues at St. Thomas University in Canada, inkshedding has three identifying characteristics:

1.     The writing is done quickly (i.e., five minutes or less).

2.     The responses are disseminated to the entire class in some form, oral or written.

3.     The responses are anonymous (though respondents may sign their names if they wish).

What do students write about?

         Depending on what teachers want to know from students, inkshedding can be prompted with open?ended questions that address the larger objectives of the course ("What areas do you need covered in the remaining weeks of the course?"), focus on specific topics ("Given the article we discussed today, what do you now consider the leading environmental concern for the '90's?"), or encourage midcourse evaluation or self?assessment ("What questions, problems, comments, or suggestions do you have about the course at this time?" or "What do you want to improve most in the remainder of the term?"). Questions will differ from instructor to instructor and course to course, depending not only on pedagogical methods but on whether the course is subject or skill based and on the frequency with which inkshedding is used. No hard and fast rules exist. I use inkshedding when I think it is most needed: when I feel out of touch with students, when discussions bog down, when conflicting views threaten class community, or when I want every student to have a voice on a decision without feeling pressure from the other students or me to decide a certain way.

         Sometimes, especially when I am using inkshedding frequently, I simply ask the students to "shed ink," with no directed prompt. In these cases, inksheddings often take on a life of their own, dialoguing with statements in earlier inksheddings, creating underground conversations that sometimes parallel, sometimes depart from the focus of the class. In a course on children's literature, several students debated who was the better stylist, A. A. Milne or E. B. White, while several others argued-in a way they had not felt comfortable to in class-whether Freudian interpretations of children's literature grossly misrepresent authorial intentions. One student used the opportunity to make a connection with material from another course: "One thing that really stands out in my mind is the way all the books portray women. Last quarter I took a sociology class that talked about how most children's books have males in dominating roles and the woman is in the home. I didn't give it much thought until I read these stories." Our class discussions had touched these issues lightly and passed on; inkshedding allowed a more extensive exploration.

How are inksheddings published?

         Teachers who use inksheddings usually face constraints of time, money, or class size. Some teachers simply read aloud handscribbled submissions and then toss them (to assure students that their text will not be kept for identification later). Some teachers assign students to editorial teams that select and type the entries, then give the master to the teacher to copy and distribute. With the proliferation of computer labs, some teachers have applied the inkshedding idea to electronic bulletin boards or have students send their inksheddings to a master folder which can be quickly assembled into a single document and printed out. (Barbara Sitko, director of the computer writing lab at Washington State University, dubs these "toner?sheddings.") In large classes of 50 or more students, where assembling weekly inksheddings would require too much time and paper, some teachers have asked part of their class to respond each week, rotating the task of assembly and printing. Although I strongly believe that it's important for all students to write and all students to have access to one another's responses, where logistics mitigate against whole-class inksheddings, partial representation is better-much better-than no inkshedding at all.

What are the benefits of inkshedding?

         First, a teacher gets an immediate glimpse into what each student is thinking and feeling. This is much more useful than the limited amount of feedback one receives from those few students who routinely speak (and who may not represent the class as a whole). Inkshedding has taught me that I am sometimes a poor reader of my students' casual comments, body language, and facial expressions and, like many teachers, I can lose sight of the complexities of my students' lives, interpreting all signs as a comment or reaction to what is happening in class. From the pages of inkshedding, I have learned of a student worried about her own pregnancy (written when the class was discussing abortion), a student who was struggling to keep awake in class because he was working double shifts, and a group that became dysfunctional because of a budding romance between two members. Having access to the underlife of an interactive classroom has helped me to escape the loop of always teaching to last semester's students, because I do not have to wait until the end of the course to know what my students are thinking.

         Inkshedding also gives students direct access to what their peers are thinking. My students regularly express their appreciation to one another for a good class discussion, prod members who hold back, ask questions they might not otherwise, and tell stories too personal to share aloud. Once, inksheddings captured the anger students felt towards a student who had rudely dominated class discussion (and their unsolicited reaction was far more effective than my intervention ever could have been). I've even had students use inkshedding as their first venue for publishing creative writing-poetry in one case, comedy routines in another. The anonymity provides everyone with an opportunity to voice ideas without risking penalty for being wrong, ignorant, or in conflict with the opinions of teachers and peers. Teachers may expect that students will use this freedom primarily to criticize, but will be surprised to find that students frequently use it to praise something they like-comments they could not normally make because teachers and peers would consider it brown-nosing if done before final grades are given. But whether praise or criticism, question or debate, inksheddings often provide students with their first real sense of the other inhabitants of the classroom. This may not seem extraordinary until one considers how little contact most students have with their fellow students in traditionally?structured courses.

         One caveat is in order: teachers who do not want to know what their students think should avoid using inksheddings because, if asked, students will be honest. I have been told that I talk too fast. A colleague learned that her lectures on art history were "too esoteric." The answer may not be for me to slow down and for my colleague to "dumb down," but we both need to consider these comments constructively. Even when teachers want to know what students honestly think, there can be painful moments. I usually tell my students that I will reprint their comments verbatim, without censorship. But once I refused to print a comment which referred to an identified student in a racist way. When I handed out the printed inkshedding the next day, I explained to the class that I had omitted one response, and I asked for their feedback in another inkshedding because I was troubled by both the nature of the comment and my decision to censor. The majority agreed with me and so the comment was never published, but the incident is still troubling. However, in nearly seven years of using inkshedding, that is the only time that I felt a student truly abused the protection of inksheddings-though there have been plenty of occasions when I felt uncomfortable with some responses and said so (for this reason, some teachers add their own inkshedding-a kind of "The Editor Responds").

         Perhaps the most interesting effect of inkshedding is its ability to reveal diversity in the classroom. Teachers know from their perspective that what works for one student often does not work for others, but students often generalize from the experience of one. Inksheddings can highlight the differences. Recently, I asked a class to comment on the portfolio?based system I was using, an approach which did not provide grades on individual papers. The following three samples represent a fair range of opinion (and are reproduced here verbatim):

         These inksheddings told me what I needed to know: that some students had missed my repeated offers to discuss grades in conferences and needed to be reminded; that some students liked the system, while others found it uncomfortable. They also reinforced what I already believed, that a system of non?grading could work with Honors students, despite the dire warnings of another teacher. But a few inksheddings did something else, as this next example shows:

         I read halfway through this entry before realizing that the student was not writing about grades at all; instead, he or she had ignored the prompt and responded instead to a debate which had taken place in the pages of earlier inksheddings, a debate which I thought had been thrashed out to everyone's satisfaction. It is comments like this-unpredictable, engrossed in the debate, addressed to the other students rather than me-which keep me reading. It suggests that despite the problems posed by nontraditional methods, the potential exists to create community, one in which the teacher has not scripted all the parts.

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