Red, yellow and green cards filled the air as instructors Joe Grimm and Jenny Hontz talked about Fire on Marlborough Street, a 1975 picture of a young woman and girl falling from a burning building. While the picture is disturbing, it also paved the way for better fire escape regulations.

The question: Should the Boston Herald have printed the picture?

Here the ethical discussion begins.

The journalism program at the National High School Institute has always taught cherubs about ethics. This year, however, a new method was brought in by Grimm, former recruiting and development editor for the Detroit Free Press and first-time instructor at the summer program.

“When you have the red, yellow, green card system, everybody has to participate,” Grimm said. “Nobody can just take a pass and not think or do anything.”

For his two ethics classes, Grimm gave each student red, yellow and green cards and explained that for every scenario discussed, green was for “agree,” red was for “disagree” and yellow was for “not sure.”

What first seemed like a strange teaching strategy soon became a cherub favorite.

“I really liked the class because it was interactive and it was stuff that you didn’t really think about, especially as a student journalist,” Marie Mandelberg of Maryland said. “It makes you realize how many problems there are when you get into the real world.”

Students learned that everything printed in a journalistic medium could cause some sort of ethical debate.

Rachel Martin of California had not recognized that so much thought went into what is published.

“The things they brought up, you just didn’t know what to think,” Martin said. “I didn’t realize that photos were an ethical thing.”

Grimm, Hontz and guest instructor Bret Begun sometimes played devil’s advocates to spark discussion.

“A lot of people got mad,” Martin said. “But the [instructors] didn’t necessarily believe what they were saying. They struck debates about things we would not think about otherwise.”

Liz Sawyer of Michigan liked the approach because of the experience she gained from it.

“You have to have people that don’t agree with you,” Sawyer said. “You’re always going to have people that don’t agree with you, and you need to understand both arguments.”

For that reason and others, Sawyer said the ethical principles learned in class will stick with cherubs forever.

“Now if I have any questions about ethics, I’m going to think in my mind, ‘Is this a red card or a green card,’” Sawyer said.

Martin found that the red and green cards helped sort out the ethical issues in a way that was easy to understand.

“It puts a face to the ethics because it makes you decide whether something is ethical,” Martin said. “It’s not always black or white. Sometimes you just need a yellow card.”