first in a series of posts celebrating our 20th anniversary year
Are you sitting down? Because we have big news: we turn 20 years old this year!
We’ve been providing professional development opportunities for elementary and middle school teachers since 1999. We’ve certainly grown and changed in two decades, but the heart of the program remains the same: we value teachers as professionals, and we believe in inquiry-based, student-centered learning.
We began as a pilot project that served a small cohort of teachers from IPS Center for Inquiry 2, IPS Cold Spring, and Orchard School. The teachers participated in week-long summer institutes and in-school coaching during the academic year. Our first anthology of student writing, When the Sun Blooms, I Say Good Morning, was published in 2001, featuring original texts by 369 students who had engaged in writing as a stand-alone content area in inquiry-based workshops inside their classrooms.
In 2001, Dr. Susan Adamson became director of what was then called the Indiana Partnership for Young Writers, charged with transforming the pilot into a sustainable program. Under her leadership it grew in multiple ways—serving more teachers from more schools, engaging more nationally and internationally renowned visiting scholars, delivering professional development in more ways, celebrating student writing in more contexts, and even expanding to include professional development in the teaching of reading. Then, after more than a decade at the helm, Dr. Adamson initiated the Partnership’s biggest change: a move to Butler University.
We moved from our physical and fiscal home inside Orchard School to Butler University in 2013, opening the door to continued growth and sustainability. We now offer professional development in the teaching of math and have expanded to include early childhood education as well. In 2018 we officially changed our name to the Partnership for Inquiry Learning to better reflect the program’s diverse array of programming.
Learn more about our name change and the impact of our move to Butler University:
And now it’s our 20th birthday. We hope you’ll reminisce and celebrate with us throughout the year as we share stories on our blog and social media. We invite you to share your stories, too. How has your work with us shaped your beliefs and practice? What are your favorite moments from the past 20 years? What does the Partnership mean to you? Send us an email, or tag us on a social media post.
In the meantime, join us in looking back on the Partnership’s 20 years of impact on the teaching of writing in this short video:
20 Years and Counting: Writing Workshop from Partnership for Inquiry Learning on Vimeo.
