The four phases

Every Critical Reading Journeys (CRJ) story takes a student through the same four stops, in the same order. Students see the stops on a small map above their conversation with the Reading Buddy, the conversation partner on the screen that asks the student questions about the story. The map calls the stops Get the Story, Dig In, Weigh It, and Make It Yours. Your reports, the one-page summaries you get after each story, use different names for the same four stops: Understand, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. Those are the names from Bloom’s taxonomy, the familiar ladder of thinking skills that runs from remembering up to creating.

You have been teaching these four things for as long as you have been teaching reading. This page is here so the names in your reports line up with what you already do.

The Reading Buddy asks the questions that move a student from one stop to the next, and it does not move on until the student has done the work of the stop they are at.

Stop 1: Understand (students see Get the Story)

In your words, this is comprehension, retelling, and first inferences. The Reading Buddy is checking who is in the story, what happened, what a character wanted, and what a passage means: the reading check you would do before any discussion.

The Reading Buddy opens with a question about a specific character or moment from the start of the story, so the student has to have read it. Then it asks the student to explain rather than repeat: not “what happened?” but “why do you think she did that?” A student who answers in a few words is asked to say more. A student who has the story wrong is sent back to the text, not corrected.

A good answer retells and then guesses. It shows the student followed the story, and it takes a first guess at what something meant.

A stuck student gives short, general answers, or answers about a story they half-remember rather than the one on the screen. If a student is stuck here story after story, the grade band, the set of 36 stories for one grade level, may be too high.

Stop 2: Analyze (students see Dig In)

In your words, this is close reading and author’s craft. The Reading Buddy is asking about patterns, structure, word choice, point of view, and what the author did on purpose.

The Reading Buddy asks the student to notice how the story is built. Why did the author start where she did? What changes between the beginning and the end? What do two characters have in common? What does a particular word choice do? These questions treat the story as something made, not just something that happened.

A good answer points to a pattern. “The first part is all about how cold it is, and then it stops mentioning the cold once they find the cabin.” That is analysis: the student noticed a pattern and pointed to where it is in the text.

A stuck student keeps retelling the story when the Reading Buddy is asking how the author built it. This is the most common place for a strong reader to stall, because many advanced readers have never been asked to look at how a text works. You can help by using the same language in class: “What did the author do there?”

Stop 3: Evaluate (students see Weigh It)

In your words, this is judgment with evidence. The student takes a position on the story or on a character’s choice, weighs other perspectives, and backs it all up with the words on the page.

The Reading Buddy asks for an opinion, and then it asks the student to defend it. Was the character right? Is the narrator reliable? Which of two ideas in the story is stronger, and where is the support for that? If a student gives an opinion without evidence, the Reading Buddy asks for the evidence. If the evidence does not fit, the Reading Buddy asks about the fit.

A good answer has a claim, a reason, and a piece of the text. “I don’t think he was being brave. He only went in because everyone was watching, and the story says he kept looking back at them.”

A stuck student gives opinions without reasons, or reasons without the text. Advanced readers often have strong opinions and thin support, because in most conversations nobody asks for the second part. The Reading Buddy asks every time.

Stop 4: Create (students see Make It Yours)

In your words, this is extension and synthesis. The student takes what they understood, analyzed, and judged, and makes something new with it: a plan, an alternative ending, a connection to their own world.

The Reading Buddy asks a question the story does not answer. What would change if the character had chosen differently? What would you tell someone facing the same problem? How would this story be different from another character’s point of view? Then it asks the student to develop the idea rather than leave it as one line.

A good answer is an idea that is not in the story but could not exist without it. This is where students surprise their teachers most often, and where a transcript, the full conversation between the student and the Reading Buddy, is most worth reading. If you ever want a classroom project to grow out of CRJ, this stop is where the seeds are.

A stuck student either restates the story or leaves it behind entirely. The Reading Buddy pushes for more than one idea and for detail on the best one. This stop takes the most thinking, and some students who moved quickly through the first three slow down here. That is the stop working.

What the Reading Buddy never does

The Reading Buddy never gives the answer. It does not tell the student what happened, does not quote the passage they should have found, and does not hint at the position it wants them to take. Every idea in a transcript came from the student, and that is the reason the reports mean something.

What it does instead is adapt. A student who has done the thinking at a stop moves on quickly, sometimes after one exchange; a student who has not gets another question at the same stop, asked a different way. That is why two students reading the same story can have conversations of very different lengths, and why a short conversation can be a good sign.

The stories are written to be read with the Reading Buddy

If a story looks too hard when you read it on your own, that is expected. The stories are written above grade level on purpose, and their difficulty is set for the story plus the conversation, not for reading the passage cold. The support is in the conversation: the Reading Buddy asks about one moment at a time, sends the student back to the text when something is wrong, and asks a different way when an answer is thin. A story that looks like a stretch on the page is usually within reach for a student working through it with the Buddy.

Judge a story’s difficulty by the transcript, not by a preview. Do not move a student down a band because the story looked hard to you. A student who reached the last stop with the Buddy asking a second question here and there is right where they should be. A student who stalled at the first stop story after story, with the Buddy asking the same thing three times, is the one to move. The same goes for a colleague or an administrator who reads a story and asks whether it is too hard: the answer is that it would be, without the conversation.

Where the phases show up in your reports

A student’s progress page, the page that shows the student’s ratings across stories, has four measures. One of them, Critical Thinking Phase Independence, is about the four stops directly. It shows how much help the student needed to get through them: a high rating means the student moved through the stops on their own, and a lower rating means the Reading Buddy had to ask again, and again. Over a semester, this is the one you would most like to see rise.

The other three measures each sit closest to one stop. Text Evidence Usage asks whether the student backs a claim with the text, which is the heart of Evaluate. Analytical Thinking Sophistication asks how much the student notices about how the text is built, which is Analyze. Evaluative Thinking Sophistication asks about the quality of the student’s judgment, which is Evaluate again. Page 5, Finding the reports, shows where each measure sits on the page.