Students should learn the fundamentals of arguments, rebuttals, reconstruction, role fulfillment, etc. before they learn about research. The goal of this curriculum is to make sure students are comfortable with the form and rhetorical style of PF debate before they augment that work with research and card cutting.
To achieve this, we spend the first 10 weeks teaching students about arguments, rebuttals, and speaking roles. By weeks 9 and 10, students should be having full PF debates without research, using only class prep. The goal is to give them a mastery of the form of PF debates.
Weeks 10-end of the semester are then devoted to teaching kids research/card cutting and incorporating those skills into debates.