Red and Green Choices ^®
By Green Irene

A Positive Behavioral Development Strategy for Students with Autism or Behavioral Predispositions
 

About This Intervention:

How to Cite/Reference Irene's "Red and Green Choices" Work

Throughout Irene's experiences during her first few years working in MH classrooms, she became very interested and focused on students with severe behavioral disorders. She witnessed many students throwing chairs or other objects across classrooms, attacking school personnel, biting themselves and displaying many other maladaptive behavioral concerns.  She became intent on focusing on a “behavior first” strategy. Irene began focusing on the “why” or “how” these now severe long-standing behavioral patterns were developed, and needed an approach for her and other classroom teachers to stop such severe behaviors before they became what she calls in her book, an “eventual uncontrollable situation”. Her method to specifically concentrate on developing positive alternative student behaviors became known as Red and Green Choices, through teaching students how to adapt and react appropriately to different environmental stimulus.

Red and Green Choices interventions address the implementation of setting high, reasonable, and achievable behavioral standards, then expecting students to choose acceptable and tolerable green solutions to situations. The strategy promotes always talking, writing words, or drawing pictures of green choice behavioral solutions to each and every behavioral response as they occur, in green.  It also promotes the same for unacceptable and intolerable red responses to stimuli, in red.  Red and Green Choices interventions provide immediate feedback to undesired behavioral responses as soon as they occur, then encourages practicing the opposite green choice behavior in a “designated area” with a “designated adult” until it is learned or developed, by breaking down behaviors into their smallest sequential green steps. The designated adult begins the "behavioral trust" process with each child receiving interventions.

Red and Green Choices allows students to be attentive to their behaviors, formulate informed decisions, while making their expectations and environment predictable and clear. Irene believes that choosing “green” becomes the student’s behavioral responsibility through attentive adult guided positive interventions. Red and Green Choices provides exact expectations for students and adults using colors, choices, predictability, structure, and positive intervention strategies while focusing on the positive outcome (expectation), instead of repeating negative information through overstimulation.  A key component to the program includes providing a behavioral “explanation, expectation, choice”, and allowing a reciprocal trustworthy behavioral relationship between the adult implementing Red and Green Choices and the child receiving its interventions, based upon Irene's own theory of "behavioral trust".

Red and Green Choices can become a very strong, intensive and meaningful relationship between teachers and their students. Most children begin to really enjoy and thrive with their Red and Green Choices, because it provides predictability and structure to their environment while making the adults around them calm, assertive, firm, predictable and proud. Students quickly decide they do not like the red consequences to their red behavioral choices. Red becomes a much disliked stimulus - even an adult just holding up their red marker across the classroom - after students learn appropriate replacement or alternative behaviors.  The pictures or writings develop into very powerful tools to promote exact understanding of behavioral expectations. The principles include meeting and exceeding the needs of students, staff and parents. This means teacher’s needs are met, too.

Once behaviors are managed, then Red and Green Choices can be used to assist with academic tasks. More time becomes available for children to intently focus on academic task completion

This behavioral intervention strategy continues to be an expanding supportive tool to many as the title book, “Red and Green Choices, A Positive Behavioral Development Strategy...” was featured in the May/June 2004 edition of Autism-Asperger’s Digest magazine.  Then in October 2006, The British "Good Autism Practice Journal" comprised a book review of "Red and Green Choices". (link: Articles)

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A Positive Behavioral Development Strategy
for Students with Autism or Behavioral Predispositions

Copyright © 2003 Green Irene      All rights reserved.