If you’re frustrated because your students can perfectly sequence four picture cards in your speech room but still struggle to retell a story in the classroom, you are not alone. The secret to bridging this gap is to stop writing isolated sequencing goals and start utilizing The Narrative Framework. By shifting your focus from rote sequencing (first, next, last) to story grammar and causal relationships, you give students the exact tools they need to understand, organize, and generate meaningful language.
The Problem with Traditional Sequencing Goals
Picture this: you’ve spent weeks working with a student on sequencing how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or how to brush their teeth. They master the goal! But when their teacher asks them to recount a story they just read or explain why a character is upset, they freeze. Why does this happen?
The reality is that traditional sequencing tasks rely heavily on rote memory and isolated chronological order, completely missing the context. In the real world, events don’t just happen in a vacuum—they happen because of cause and effect. When we only teach “first, next, last,” we increase our students’ cognitive load without giving them a meaningful structure to anchor their thoughts.
What I Do Instead: The Narrative Framework
To work smarter and actually see carryover into the classroom, we need to focus on narrative macrostructure. Here is how you can pivot your therapy approach to be more functional and evidence-based.
1. Target Story Grammar Elements
Instead of arbitrary sequences, teach students the building blocks of a story. When students understand the Story Grammar Approach—identifying the characters, setting, initiating event (the problem), internal response, plan, attempt, and resolution—they naturally understand the sequence of events because they understand the why.
2. Focus on Causal Chains
Events in a story are linked by cause and effect. Instead of asking, “What happened next?”, ask, “Because the character felt sad, what did they decide to do?” This shifts the focus from simply memorizing an order to deeply understanding character motivations and problem-solving.
3. Use Literacy-Based Therapy
Ditch the disconnected picture cards and lean into high-quality picture books. Using real literature provides rich, authentic contexts for students to practice organizing information. It also seamlessly aligns your speech therapy goals with their classroom reading standards.
How to Write Narrative Goals Instead
If you’re ready to make the switch, here are a few ways to structure your IEP goals to reflect this approach:
- Retell: “Given a narrative text, the student will retell the story including at least 5 story grammar elements (e.g., character, setting, problem, plan, resolution) with 80% accuracy.”
- Comprehension: “After listening to a short story, the student will answer explicit and inferential questions related to the story’s causal chain (e.g., ‘Why did the character do that?’) in 4 out of 5 opportunities.”
Ready to Ditch the Sequencing Cards?
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to start targeting narratives effectively. If you want access to done-for-you literacy-based therapy units, visual organizers, and digital data tracking, we’ve got you covered.
👉 Start your free trial at slpnow.com/pod. (No credit card required!)
If you want to dive deeper into the exact steps for teaching narratives, be sure to check out our on-demand narrative courses inside the SLP Summit.
Transcript
On today's episode, I want to chat about something that's a little controversial, but in a good way, and it's why I don't write sequencing goals, at least not in the way that many of us are used to. I am going to share what I do instead and why I believe that this leads to better generalization and improved outcomes for our students.
First let's chat a little bit about what we usually mean by sequencing goals and why that might be a problem. I've written these goals in the past, but they look like: "Student will sequence for picture cards or Student will follow three step directions. It's a lot with picture cards and following directions, and that kind of sequencing is very decontextualized, stripped down and uses isolated tasks.
And the problem is that these isolated tasks often don't generalize. So a student might be able to order four picture cards or follow three step directions, but what does that matter if they can't apply that into the classroom? The things that really matter are being able to tell stories, retell events, understanding sequences of events in real life. Sequencing in real life rarely exists in a vacuum, like real communication, like telling a story, telling what happened at recess, that involves vocabulary, grammar, memory, attention, story structure, which is way more than isolated ordering of some pictures. And the research supports this too. Targeting sequencing in isolation often taps only short-term memory, and it doesn't build the complex cognitive language skills needed for comprehension and expressive language. So if we're writing a sequencing goal, like: "Student will sequence four picture cards with 80% accuracy", and if we're only using those sequencing cards, that builds a narrow skillset that doesn't reflect real world language use and won't generalize outside of the classroom.
Then what does it actually look like? What do I do instead? So what I have found to help, and the research supports this as well, is that I contextualize sequencing within narrative based frameworks. And so we target sequencing goals within narrative based therapy and work with real stories.
Instead of picture cards or decontextualized routines, we use books, story retells, or personal narratives, and that way sequencing becomes part of a bigger picture. We're able to incorporate vocabulary, grammar, story grammar, comprehension, all of these different skills that provide a really meaningful context and are reflective of how students would be using this in the real world.
And then facilitate facilitating that generalization, because again it doesn't matter if they can sequence 10 images with a hundred percent accuracy if this isn't generalizing to the classroom. By using a narrative based approach, we're encouraging students to build a mental schema, and that helps them recall and organize information that frees up their working memory for comprehension and expressive language, and instead of just having to memorize.
By doing this, we're able to address underlying skills like working memory and attention. Sequencing isn't just about ordering events or pictures, it heavily relies on skills like working memory and attention. by targeting these skills in context rather than an isolated ordering of pictures, we're supporting comprehension, narrative retell, expressive language, following directions, all of those different types of skills, and planning for generalization from the start. We're building towards comprehension versus a very isolated skill.
And by embedding sequencing in this narrative context, we're giving students repeated opportunities to target additional skills like using temporal vocabulary, first, next, then last. They get to use causal language. They get to incorporate story grammar, and those are all really important for real world communication.
So what does this actually look like? Instead of writing a goal of "Student will sequence four picture cards with 80% accuracy", we might write goals about when given a short story, the Student will retell the story with temporal language. Or when asked to produce a personal narrative, the student will produce a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, end structure and at least three temporal or causal words. Those are two examples of how this might come together. In the show notes, I'll give the full example of the goal . What this looks like in therapy is that we use real stories from books, familiar routines, personal experiences, and we use those to build vocabulary model, temporal and causal language, support working memory, and then gradually fade those scaffolds.
Some common things that SLPs might say are, I need a goal that's easy to measure. And these are perfectly measurable goals. Like the examples that I gave, you can develop a probe to easily measure progress towards that.
Another common thought that I've heard is my student really struggles with sequencing.
That is also valid. We can provide scaffolding and support in these contextualized activities. Maybe we can just use a really short personal narrative, but that is a lot more meaningful than random picture cards. We can create, we can use pictography and make quick pictures, and then gradually increase the complexity, but at least we're starting with a meaningful context.
So why this matters in terms of the big picture, we're helping students gain skills that they'll actually use, whether that's producing narratives, retelling narratives, comprehension, following multi-step directions. Targeting sequencing in this way will lead to really meaningful gains of some functional skills, and by teaching in this way, we're also helping students build cognitive skills like memory and attention, and we're more likely to see carryover and generalization when we're using this type of approach.
And if you're curious what this looks like in context with some concrete examples, I'd love to see you at the SLP Summit. My course is on demand. I'll include a link in the show notes. It'll be available until January 31st. I would love to see you there, and we are including some cool freebies as well.
Definitely check that out if you're wanting to learn more about what this could look like. That's a wrap for today. Thanks for hanging out and we'll see you next time.
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