Community Magazine November 2009

60 Community magazine i nsights into education “Why don’t you answer me? I’m talking to you! I’ve told you a thousand times not to pretend that nobody is talking to you!” Moshe’s mother is at her wits end. He so often ignores, argues, and refuses to cooperate, for no apparent reason. What is most frustrating is that nine-year-old Moshe doesn’t seem to behave this way out of malice or anger. He is actually a nice, sweet kid. But nomatter howmany times he is scolded, he continues to ignore people. When he behaves this way in class, his rebbe punishes him for having husspah. Moshe, however, doesn’t understand what he’s doing wrong. Moshelikelyhassomesocialskills difficulties which interfere with his relationships both at home and in school. If Moshe learned some simple social behaviors, he’d stop having annoying and frustrating interactions with the people in his life. The Behavioral Traffic Light What are social skills? If you think about it, social skills can be broken down into two sets of behaviors: behaviors that one should do (“green behaviors”), and behaviors that one should avoid doing (“red behaviors”). Someone who displays inappropriate behavior needs to learn to stop doing them, and those who don’t know what to do or say in a given situation need to learn how. Children and adults who oftentimes fall into one or both of the above categories may have social difficulties. Fortunately, there is a simple set of strategies that, when used properly, can accelerate the social learning process. The Red and Green Learning System (based on the traffic light system, whereby green means “go” and red means “stop”) uses six simple steps to teach any social behavior: Label, Picture, Model, Practice, Rein- force, Correct. Let’s use Moshe’s behavior as an example. In this case, ignoring would be Red. What Moshe needs to learn is to an- swer immediately. Therefore, the Green label would be “Answering Immediately” and the Red label would be “Ignoring.” Distinguishing the Red From the Green It is critical that each Red behavior have a Green counterpart. Children with social difficulties oftentimes have no clue what they should be doing instead of Reds, despite having been told hundreds of times. The reason why they still don’t “get it” is that “telling” re- quires the child to be an auditory learner, which means that he needs to learn by simply listening. Many children have trouble learning through only the auditory modality. They do better when informa- tion is presented visually (with pictures, models, graphic displays, etc.) or in a kinesthetic/tactile manner (hands-on, puppet shows, actually doing it). The Red and Green Learning Method teaches through visuals and kinesthetic/tactile tools instead of through just listening. Once the behavior has been labeled, a simple set of pictures is drawn to depict each Red and Green pair. Using the drawings, the child is shown how to respond in a Green way, as well as how he had responded in a Red way in the past. This step (drawing a pic- ture) can occasionally be skipped, as long as the child absorbs the concept sufficiently using all the other steps. Next, the adult models how to do the Green and Red behaviors. The adult can use hand or finger puppets, act it out with another adult or child, or use Legos and even pens to depict the adult and child (or two children) interacting. At this point, the child gets to practice the Red and Green behav- ior by making his own puppet shows about the behavior that was just presented. The child may also imitate the adult’s puppet show. You can play a game with the child in which he acts out a behavior, DEVORAH SAMET Teaching Social Ski lls the Green Way