Sequencing

Ross Woods. Rev. 2018

A sequence is the order in which you you will progress through the material. Sequencing is the skill of putting things in an order that makes them very easy for students to understand. You need to sequence material in a way that students will see a simple, natural progression in the lessons. All sequences:

It's easy to teach people something they already know. The challenge is to teach them something that they don't know yet. If students think "That seems easy" and "That makes sense" or "I can do it now" then the sequence is probably working. Get a sequence a little bit wrong and students will ask questions to cover your gaps. Get it badly wrong, and your students will be frustrated and confused, and you will probably have to teach the lesson again. If that's not enough, you'll find that it is more difficult to correct confused students than to teach it well the first time. Like most of teaching, it is about accurately anticipating how students will respond.

For the teacher, sequencing is important at two levels:
• each lesson
• the series of lessons (the whole course)

By the way, sequencing also applies to "whole of curriculum" design and to articulation between schools, e.g. from elementary school to middle school.

 

Idiosyncratic sequences

Sequences can be idiosyncratic, reflecting the creativity and the personal viewpoint of an individual teacher at a particular time. Some creative sequences might be fun for everybody and make the lessons very easy to teach. But it's not always that simple:

  1. Your sequence might make sense only to you and your students at the time, and might somehow not make sense next year when you plan to teach the same lesson again.
  2. Other teachers might be unable to follow your sequencing, especially if they have only your written notes to guide them. If you are a curriculum developer preparing lessons that other teachers will teach, you need a sequence that will work for them.
  3. If you are revising a course or lesson outline, you might like the sequencing but still want to improve it by adding or deleting parts, or expanding or contracting parts.

 

Plan your series of lessons

At this stage, you are looking at the series of sessions as a whole and sorting it into a progression of lessons as a deliberate sequence.

  1. First, decide what you want your students to achieve at the end of the unit. This is a more difficult question than it sounds, but a clear idea of exactly what you want to teach will simplify your teaching life.
  2. Second, sort content together according to topics. This will mean that you'll only have to teach everything once. You might need to add other skills to help students achieve those outcomes or add items of relevant prerequisite knowledge
  3. Third, divide the content into manageable chunks of about equal size and difficulty. (The current term is "chunking.")
  4. Fourth, make an outline of your series of sessions so that each lesson is about one (and no more than one) topic that leads to your goal for the unit.

When you have a plan for your series of lessons, you can decide on a sequence for each lesson.

 

Kinds of sequences

The number of possible effective sequences is almost limitless, just as there is no limit to the number of sequences that don't work. In this section, we'll teach a few of the most important sequences. Some of them are primarily suit vocational training, but others are quite universal. After that, you can be free to explore your own.

Progress chronologically (recommended) Use steps or stages as if you were telling a story. Easy to use for lots of things.
Make the basic principles clear very early, and then build on them. Good for working with concepts, and appeals to conceptual learners. You can add sophistication or detail afterwards. You can explore different case studies to see how the principles work in practice.
Simple to complex skills 1 Introduce the topic of study, provide basic skills and practice in each lesson, then put skills together in a more complex project.
Simple to complex skills 2 Start with orientation, then monitor adjustment, then provide basic skills and practice in each lesson, and then provide more sophisticated skills.
Appy an idea Hook: Start with a question or activity that motivates students to learn about the topic.
Book: What does the information say? (I call this cognition level, because students need the basic facts to register in their thinking.)
Look: What at the implications.
Took: How will we put it into practice?
Ref. Larry Richards
Quest Go on a quest to find answers. Start with giving some information, then give a question or task, then let students explore and reflect. This sequence is quite difficult to use because you need some idea where your students might end up. But you can't predetermine their answers.
The classic outline The classic outline was developed by the ancient Greeks. It is excellent for an individual lesson if you have a point that you need to make and prove. It can work best in some kinds of lecture situations, especially if you are dealing with ideas. It depends on your ability to be very fair with evidence and not over-opinionated.
1. Introduction: Define the importance of your topic, and express your point (the thesis) as a declarative statement.
2. Defense: Describe honestly each argument against your point, starting with the strongest argument. Give a response to each one, either by defending your thesis or by qualifying it.
3. Give supporting arguments: Give each argument in support of your thesis, starting from the weakest argument and going through to the strongest. Give evidence for each argument. Give more space or time to the stronger arguments.
4. Conclusion: Restate your thesis, recap the arguments, and close with a general application that doesn't bring up any new points.
Sequence 1 1. Identify the purpose and why it is important
2. Look at what it is that students need to know (the content)
3. Identify the implications of putting it into practice
4. Make the decision to implement it
5. Attempt implementation
Sequence 2 1. Identify the purpose and why it's important
2. Research a procedure
3. Formulate an approach
4. Implement the approach
5. Evaluate.
Sequence 3 1. Introduce the topic of study
2. Provide basic skills and practice in each lesson
3. Put skills together in a more complex project for assessment.
Sequence 4 1. Give orientation
2. Monitor adjustment
3. Provide basic skills and practice
4. Provide more sophisticated skills.
Sequence 5 1. I do, you watch
2. I do, you help
3. You do, I help
4. You do, I watch
Sequence 6 1. Give students an idea with a short explanation that they can easily understand.
2. Get them to make a simple response to it. (The purpose at this stage is to engage students rather than explore the idea.)
3. Do a learning activity that helps them understand it. You will need to give students considerable guidance at this stage, because the idea is still quite new to them.
4. Students do more learning activities with decreasing amounts of teacher help. This is called the "fade" because the role of the teacher fades out. It correlates to practice and formative assessment.)
5. Students do it on their own without help. This is called the "release" because the student is released to do the task by him/herself. It is also the summative assessment phase.
Sequence 7 1. In your preparation, break the skill into simple steps. This will make it easy to understand and communicate.
2. Start by telling students the purpose or goal of the skill.
3. Show the students how to do each step.
4. Let students do each step with help and supervision. (They start performing the skill themselves.)
5. Let them practice repeatedly with little or no help and supervision. (They become proficient)
6. Assess whether they can do it. (Now you know that they have the skill.)
7. You can add any difficult cases after students have the basic skill. There might be variations of the basic skill, complications, or exceptions.

 

Concrete to abstract

This learning cycle can be used for individual units, for clusters of units, or for whole courses. It can even be used as a weekly or monthly cycle for supervising practicum. At higher qualification levels, where conceptual skills are more prominent, the reflection and concept formation stages are essential and need time to do well.

The cycle comprises four stages:

  1. Concrete experience. Students need to do the job with real people in real situations learning real skills. On-job learning is by nature holistic, not artificially divided into many separate units. By being workplace-driven, students' learning experience can be highly efficient and very practical.
    If you are leading a group through this stage you might be most interested in asking questions like: "What did you do?" "What happened?" You might also want to get your students to explain their experiences as a story.
  2. Observation and reflection. Students need time to reflect on what they do, ask the bigger "why?" questions figure out the "big picture" of what they are trying to achieve. Sometimes the challenge is to find the best questions, not just the best answers.
    It is best if students can meet with peers who are going through similar experiences, and get input that is not available at the workplace. It may be in a classroom situation, or it may be at a much wider gathering.
  3. Concept formation. At this, stage, students need to start developing their own idea of what is going on or understanding how to achieve a particular purpose. At this stage they are still working with hypotheses, things that they have not fully tested for themselves. Some students will be very creative and others might simply be "internalizing" an already existent body of skills and knowledge.
    If you're working at a higher academic level, you'll probably find that information (e.g. textbooks, library, Internet) might be very helpful at his stage. But don't let your students just believe whatever authors say; they need to formulate their own ideas through evaluating written materials.
  4. Testing new learning. At this stage, students put their new knowledge into practice to see how it works. This will give them new experiences from which to learn and start the cycle again.

 

Sequencing in early education

Sequencing strategies follow a continuum with high support at one end, through varying levels of support to low support at the other end. Some kinds of sequencing can be used not only in individual lessons, but also over a year. Teachers can also use them to adapt their approaches to different students. For example, some students might simply be shy.

High support Low support
Instructions with demonstration Instructions without demonstration
Single step instructions Instructions with multiple steps
Offering fewer choices Offering more choices
Offering many cues or models (e.g. labels with photographs and words) Offering few cues or models (e.g. words only)
Receptive (e.g. children may nod or point to their choice) Expressive (e.g. ask children so that the need to say what they want)
Ask yes/no questions Ask questions that require a descriptive answer
More verbal cues (E.g. "Tell me about your painting. This looks like water.") Fewer verbal cures (E.g. "Tell me about your painting.")
Specific support (E.g. "on the top shelf") Less specific support (E.g. "on the shelf")

Based on E.D. Hirsch and Alice K. Wiggins Preschool Sequence and Teacher Handbook (Charlottesville, N.C. Core Knowledge Foundation, 2009), pp. 82-83.

 

Teaching ideas and methods: Bloom’s taxonomy

This particular sequence is good for teaching ideas, theories, approaches, or methodologies. It’s based on what is known in education as "Bloom’s taxonomy". It takes a bit of practice to get right, but it’s brilliant when you do.

The basic sequence for teaching one rather complex idea or way of doing something, given below, is divided into two levels:

The lower level

  1. Start by getting students to answer the basic "What?" questions, without interpreting or jumping to conclusions. What are the facts or basic items of information?
  2. Understanding
    1. Translate the basic information into a different form. This is a very useful way to teach for understanding. For example, get students to:
      1. "express in your own words"
      2. tell as a story
      3. draw as a picture or diagram
      4. make up a role-play
      5. create an example or a case study.
    2. Explain the relationship between different elements. (This is usually fairly difficult, because you have to pick out elements that don’t have self-explanatory interrelationships.)
    3. Explore implications and/or consequences. This is also very useful, although you might need to give clear examples for students to explore. Ask questions like
      1. "What would happen if . . . ?"
      2. "What else could happen?"
      3. "What kind of results would you expect?"
      4. "Who else would be affected by … ?"
      5. "What kind of responses might you get?"
  3. Application: how to put it into practice

The higher level

If you teach higher level thinking skills (often necessary in higher qualifications), you can add a whole new level of sophistication.

To implement it, you will need to teach two (or more) approaches.

  1. First, teach students one approach using the "lower level" sequence above from Bloom's taxonomy.
  2. Second, teach the other approach (or approaches) using the same sequence.

You are then ready to compare the different approaches and answer some higher-level, more theoretical questions:

  1. Analysis: Comparing the various methods, what are the fundamental elements of the task?
  2. Synthesis: Could we re-arrange these fundamental elements in a new way and create a new method or theory?
  3. Evaluation: Draw informed conclusions on the strengths, weaknesses, limitations and validity of individual approaches and of the combined whole.

 

Integrate assessment into classroom schedules

Classroom schedules normally give you limited time to get students to the outcome.

Look at all the advantages of integrating assessment into lessons:

  1. You can normally get everything done within your time limits.
  2. Assessment is easier to manage if you can use the same activity for practice, formative assessment and final assessment.
  3. If you let each stage of a lesson flow naturally into the next, practice progresses easily into the final assessment. Students are better prepared for assessment and less nervous.
  4. It is very unlikely that students will be assessed as not yet competent because you have observed their practice and given formative assessments.
  5. Besides, students have a better chance of being ready for final assessment on time if you notice soon enough what they still need help or extra practice with.

Here’s how a training session can follow these stages:

Introduction: You let people know the purpose and why this is important
Demonstration: You show students what to do and tell them how to do it
Guided practice: The students try it and you provide guidance
Independent practice: They try it with less guidance from you.
Formative assessment: You monitor how they are going and informally do a formative assessment while they are practicing. You might also ask students to assess themselves or assess each other.
Summative assessment: When students are ready, you do the final assessment by walking around the class with an assessment form.

 

You can also use the same progression over several lessons or over a whole unit. It is normally a mistake to do a summative assessment in each lesson, and you would have summative assessment towards the end of the unit.

A danger to avoid. If you hold many small assessments over a longer period, you might not put all the bits together. Make sure that it really is summative assessment and that you put all the bits together.

 

Write an outline

Put the chunks in sequence and allocate time for each stage and for giving assessments. Don't lump too much into some lessons and leave others thin.

It might look like this:

Session 1: Introduction: What is Occupational Health and Safety?

Session 2: Basic rules and principles

Session 3: Conducting a basic workplace safety check

Session 4: Industry-specific requirements

Session 5: Conducting an industry-specific safety check

Session 6: Remediation strategies

Session 7: Investigation protocols

Session 8: Assessment

 

Check. Will it will meet the need? Check the outline against what students need to learn and what they already know. Will it get students from where they are to where they need to get to? The assessment methods and tools also need to be worked out at this stage, but it is such a major task that it is covered separately.

 

Tip: In vocational and higher education, the trend is to flip the class-room. If you give lectures, put them on YouTube and assign them for homework. Then spend the whole class time for activities.