Teaching Pinyin and Characters together vs Teaching Pinyin then Characters
When I was first learning Chinese, we were using the New Practical Chinese Reader series of books. In them:


Dialogues and vocabulary are presented with both characters and pinyin.
You were only expected to memorize a subset of the characters used in a given chapter (e.g., in the first dialogue, you only had to learn how to write 你, 好, and 吗 or something like that).
Eventually you get weaned off pinyin for the dialogues and in some of the vocabulary parts.