Anne Norford

Anne Norford, principal of Brownsville Elementary School in Crozet, Virginia, talks about approaches to communicating with parents about their children's performance-based assessment. Excerpted from a videotaped interview with Anne Norford (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1992).

"How do you tell parents what's going on when you don't give lots of grades and tests and they don't take home fifty pages of work a week. We do that with positive and narrative report cards. Here again, we're growing and learning. We're finding the time and by in large, the student finds a better job. We had to develop a whole new way of talking, and it took years to learn not to use comparison when you describe somebody's child. We've learned better, and we've learned that the secret is to give constant information. You can show a parent, this is what your child's writing looked like on the day school opened. This is what your child's writing looks like today."

This Critical Issue was researched and written by Tynette W. Hills, an educational consultant based in Durham, North Carolina.

Date posted: 1997
Revised: 1999