The Northeast Noyce Professional Learning Network Presents
Fall 2025 – Spring 2026
A Professional Learning Community (PLC) is a group of teachers who meet regularly to improve their teaching and help students succeed. Each PLC will focus on a specific topic or theme, such as a subject area or a teaching strategy. Members will take part in hands-on learning and work together in ways that connect directly to their jobs. The sessions will include examples of strong teaching and time for feedback and reflection.
Each PLC will have about six members. Most groups will meet for six sessions that each last between one to two hours. Some work will happen between meetings. Start times will vary, with the first groups beginning in October. A member of the Northeast Noyce Teacher Leader Cadre will lead each PLC.
Northeast STEM teachers who fully participate in all PLC sessions will receive a $450 stipend.
We strongly encourage you to invite a STEM colleague or teaching partner from your school or district to join the PLC with you. Learning is more meaningful when someone else understands your teaching environment. Having a partner from a similar setting can help you both apply what you learn more easily in your classrooms.
Overview:
This PLC is open to all high school science educators (grades 9-12). During each PLC session, participants will read a chapter from Building Thinking Classrooms (Liljedahl, 2020), and use its framework.Overview:
This PLC will focus on the natural history of the Northeast and how to use that natural history to provide rich context for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) related phenomena and problem solving in the STEAM world.Overview:
What if every K–2 math lesson you taught helped students think deeply, talk confidently, and truly understand numbers? Join us for a 7-session journey into student-centered mathematics that will transform the way you plan, teach, and assess K–2 math.Overview:
Ready to inspire a generation of math doers? Join a dynamic professional learning community where you'll discover how to foster a positive math identity in every student and help them embrace their role as capable math learners.Overview:
This PLC will explore how Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) may serve as a research-based framework to help teachers to identify and develop curricular materials that support students in making sense of real-world phenomena by applying core disciplinary ideas and crosscutting concepts.Overview:
Are you interested in learning more about how to bring science to life in your K-6 elementary science classroom by utilizing both phenomena and the science and engineering practices? In this PLC we will use excerpts from Helping Students Make Sense of the World Using Next Generation Science and Engineering Practices by Schwarz to explore each of the eight SEPs and how they help students engage in sense-making of the world around them.Overview:
What do grades really mean? Which assignments should I grade? This PLC is for secondary teachers who are ready to collaboratively reflect on their grading practices.Overview:
“When will we ever use this in real life?” Instead of avoiding this question, what if we used it to inspire learning? This PLC explores how to turn that common student challenge into an opportunity by designing real-world modeling projects that help students apply what they learned in meaningful and relevant ways.Overview:
Effective math teaching practices don’t have to be a mystery. Participants will use the text, "Taking Action: Implementing Effective Math Teaching Practices," (Huinker & Bill, 2017) as a guide to engage in collaborative discussions about effective math teaching practices and how they can be prioritized in K-5 math instruction.Overview:
In this PLC, we’ll explore the Experience First, Formalize Later approach to math instruction—an engaging way to help students develop deeper conceptual understanding before moving to formal definitions and procedures.