I found this account of a reimagined approach to using Blue Books by professors Danielle Kane and Claire Mason quite engaging. It moves blue books from summative to formative assessment.

My Blue Book Experience

As a university student, I experienced blue books for exams at one of my universities, Midwestern State University. The history professor, an engaging speaker whose lectures imprinted on my mind simply by the way he spoke, had deemed blue books how his tests were to be given. So, when the time came, I found myself with a bunch of other students in a hall, writing by hand in a blue book. Since I enjoy writing, it was fun. Much better than multiple choice tests. Ugh.

Rethinking Blue Book Use

Consider this description:

This, to us, is a key contribution that blue books can make in their various uses.

As Warner noted in a recent post “What Matters?”, our challenge “is to convince students that there is a genuine benefit in the struggle of learning as something distinct from the steady forced march of schooling.”

Having picked up a few of John Warner’s books, I haven’t gotten to that yet. But this description is quite engaging of blue book use:

Claire used blue books as a form of in-class journaling, reflection, and process-based practice writing.

At the start of the semester, she distributed fresh blue books to her classes with an introductory prompt based on the learning outcomes of the class as a way to create a baseline for students’ writing, both to get to know the students as well as to learn more about their handwriting, thought process, and timed writing ability.

Claire would then collect the books at the end of class. As the semester progressed, she would slowly increase the amount of writing.

The prompts ranged from reading-based responses to creative musings to self-reflections. Scaffolding assignments, like annotated bibliographies, practice theses, short “they say/I say” essays, six sentence arguments, outlines, and free writing were conducted in class using blue books alongside creative poems, music video storyboarding, short story writing, and post-unit reflections based on the Taxonomy of Reflection.

She then asked students to engage in the think-pair-share modelwhere they would discuss their blue book answers with a partner, then either share out to the whole class or build upon incrementally larger sharing groups until the whole class had rejoined to discuss their ideas.

You will want to read the rest of it. I find this to be an approach worth adopting in the face of encouraging process writing, reflection, offline blogging.

Composition Books and Writing by Hand

I have to admit, I am sympathetic to Chanea Bond’s similar experience with having students writing in composition books. As a boy at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Panama City, Republic of Panama, I spent an awful lot of time writing in composition books. Even today, I still revisit these notebooks and have purchased class sets to use with my students (that time has past now, of course).

She describes how she uses Composition books:

The first and most important move I made was providing every student with a 50-cent composition notebook that I sourced over multiple trips to office supply stores across the greater Dallas–Fort Worth area. Every day, my students and I engaged with our learning by writing in our notebooks. We reflected, brainstormed, and drafted everything by hand, which I learned through research has benefits I hadn’t previously considered.

Every piece of writing in my classes, from drafts to final submissions, was nurtured within those pages. Students could visually track their progress and growth, and I was there, writing alongside them. My journal is full of all the year’s ideas and drafts. When I asked students about what they were proudest of at the end of each semester, many held up their journals as proof that they could achieve difficult tasks.

This is all part of an effort, perhaps less to ban Gen AI, but to allow students the opportunity to wrestle with ideas, mano a mano, hand to chaotic concept. What writer hasn’t enjoyed the struggle of making sense of the chaos?