Types of Groups

Professional Learning Teams (PLTs)

Professional Learning Teams (PLTs) are small teams of teachers/counselors who meet together regularly to collaboratively learn, investigate, and implement best practices. Engaging in a PLT is a deliberate process that requires regular participation and a willingness to move beyond sharing lessons and ideas to critically examining practice, research, and implementation. 

Professional Interest Groups

Professional Interest Group meetings serve as a scheduled time for multiple Master Teachers/Counselors to meet to explore in an introductory way a professional topic that has value for them, to problem-solve around a particular educational issue they are facing, or to share resources and ideas. Participants will work to learn from their teaching practice and one another, and look to bring back new ideas to support student success.

Collegial Circles

Collegial Circles grapple with ideas and issues in education, supported by the use of print and digital texts. These are not book study groups of one book... instead, groups of Master Teachers/Counselors collaboratively examine new knowledge, ideas, and strategies and presented in research-backed literature, attempt to implement these findings in their own classroom context, and report back on the success and challenges they encountered. The goal is to critically examine one's own teaching practice and to engage with new ideas and strategies to support personal growth and student learning. Together, group members are working towards an improvement of their classroom practice as evidenced by enhanced student outcomes.

Outreach Groups

Outreach Groups develop activities and events that serve an audience external to the NYSMTP.  The activities and events created by Outreach Groups are typically tied to a particular content or education topic and require a significant amount of planning (often several months to a year). The work of these groups is frequently done in collaboration with other organizations as well. 

2025-2026 MT-Led Groups

Adding STEAM to the Elementary Classroom

PLT co-facilitated by Andrea Mango, Julie Sylor, and Emerson Smith

Adding STEAM to the Elementary Classroom PLT is designed to challenge educators to step outside their comfort zones and develop a strong "STEAM" mindset—an approach to teaching and learning that sparks curiosity, nurtures creativity, and strengthens problem-solving skills through interdisciplinary connections.  Embracing a STEAM mindset empowers students to approach the world with innovation, collaboration, and a growth mindset, where mistakes are seen as valuable learning opportunities. We will take a collaborative approach to explore research-based best practices, reflect on our instructional strategies, and design meaningful, hands-on challenges, investigations, and technology projects. This PLT isn’t about adding more to your workload—it’s about reimagining your existing teaching practices and finding opportunities within curriculum, standards, and themed activities to create lessons which weave student choice, real-world challenges, critical thinking, and cross-curricular connections into your everyday instruction.

Ambitious Chemistry

PLT co-facilitated by Michael Dalessandro, Stephanie Lane, and Michael Domino

Ambitious Chemistry In this PLT, educators will explore the Ambitious Science Teaching book and its transformative framework. Our primary goal is to become more empowered to shift towards a student-centered model that fosters discovery, inquiry, and scientific exploration. Our group welcomes high school Chemistry teachers eager to enhance their instructional practices. Anticipated activities could include collaborative unit and/or planning, peer observations via video recording, and/or reflective discussions centered on implementing the book's strategies. Participants will engage in hands-on experiments and inquiry-based projects that stimulate student curiosity and engagement.  We will utilize resources such as the book itself, along with supplementary texts on inquiry-based learning and digital tools, including interactive simulations and virtual labs. By the end of the group, participants will be equipped with innovative techniques and a supportive network to enrich their Chemistry teaching practices.

Building Thinking Classrooms in Math (K-6)

PLT co-facilitated by Michael Milliman and Kristin Stark

How might we reorganize almost everything in a classroom to increase STUDENT engagement and real THINKING? This PLT will create a space where people feel safe to explore a WILDLY different way to organize a class in order to support student thinking over student mimicry.  Participants will deploy some of the elements of Peter Liljedahl's Building Thinking Classroom practices and then reflect with peers to see how to maximize those elements in future lessons and experiences. Each PLT meeting would focus on the elements through experiencing tasks, reflecting on the tasks deployed in the intervening weeks and then planning for new tasks coming up.

Building Thinking Classrooms in Science

PLT co-facilitated by Deanna Przepiora and Jamie Mancuso-Dulak

How might we use BTC structures to increase engagement and equitable participation in science classrooms? This PLT will explore how to adapt and implement Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) strategies—originally developed for mathematics—into science instruction to promote inquiry, collaboration, and student-centered learning. Aimed at K-12 science teachers, the group will engage in collaborative study of BTC concepts, align strategies with NGSS science and engineering practices, and co-design tasks that make student thinking visible. Activities will include reading and discussing key texts, planning, implementing, and refining BTC tasks and BTC practices, and sharing reflections and resources.

Creating and Using Instructionally Supportive Assessments in NGSS Classrooms Collegial Circle

PLT facilitated by Alan Baczkiewicz

Creating and Using Instructionally Supportive Assessments in NGSS Classrooms Collegial Circle How might we utilize 3D PE's to develop smaller 3D tasks during a unit that will help us to achieve that summative PE? This collegial circle has a focus on K-12 Science Teachers. We will be learning how to make formative 3D assessments using the methods provided in the text Creating and Using Instructionally Supportive Assessments in NGSS Classrooms. No prerequisite knowledge besides NYSSLS standards and PE's will be needed. The main monthly task as we progress through meetings will be to read and develop the materials for that chapter based on participants' content/grade. Chapters include unpacking PE's, creating dimension maps, creating formative performance learning tasks, creating rubrics for those tasks, and ensuring that tasks are equitable and 3D. Participants will also use NYS-developed Performance Level Descriptors (PLDs) to relate tasks to state expectations.  By the end of the study, teachers will have created formative assessment materials needed for one unit of study.   Note: For those who did not attend in 2024-25 Collegial Circle, the first meetings will quickly review the initial chapters and then continue to cover Chapters 5-9.

Elevating Scientific Thinking

PLT co-facilitated by Rae Zimmerman and Kristin Narde

How might we use Paul Anderson’s video teacher mini-lessons to improve classroom thinking skills, ultimately leading to understanding and explaining scientific principles more effectively? The goal of this PLT is to view Paul Anderson’s mini-lessons on CCC/SEPs and his Mindset Collection. We plan on integrating the strategies in our classrooms and sharing experiences. The PLT is open to all grade levels - but is primarily beneficial for elementary and middle school learners to build the foundational skills as early as possible.

Engaging Introduction for HS Math Topics

PLT co-facilitated by Thomas Wall

How might we effectively introduce math topics in a way that is engaging and accessible to all learners? This PLT will bring together high school math teachers to create, implement, and refine lessons that launch units of study. These lessons will invite students into the mathematics in interesting and creative ways and provide equitable access to content. Participants will collaborate to develop tasks and activities, reflect on their implementation, and refine accordingly.    

Enhancing Science Practices

PLT co-facilitated by Sandra Miller and Michael Delmont

Enhancing Science Practices How might we enhance our students' science practices? The goals for our professional interest group include exploring the research and resources available to develop and enhance science practices in our classes.  Science practices include planning and conducting science investigations, data analysis and interpretation, obtaining information from scientific articles, and constructing models.  Our target audience includes middle and high school science teachers. Activities will consist of discussing experiences and practices used by members, as well as researching activities and lessons to develop science practices.  Our PIG will create a resource library to share, including lessons, activities, and best practices that enhance science practice. Potential resources include case studies, scientific articles, data nuggets, POGILs, model construction resources, HHMI Biointeractive, online labs, and more.

Growing STEM in School Gardens

PLT facilitated by Mimi Joint

Growing STEM in School Gardens How might STEM teachers increase their experience with school gardens as a tool for learning both academic content and real-life skills? The goals of this Professional Interest Group are to survey members about experiences with school gardens, identify existing school gardens, visit at least one successful school garden, and discuss how school gardens can enhance classroom instruction.  We hope to collect lesson plans that utilize the school garden as a learning tool. The target audience for this PIG is K-12 STEM teachers.  We anticipate discussing grant funding opportunities, developing a rationale for building a school garden, and exploring school garden educational resources for K-12 classrooms.

Lab Minds: Physics Investigation Exploration

PLT co-facilitated by Yianna Russo and Sue Saeli

Lab Minds is a Master Teacher-Led professional learning community focused on the exploration and implementation of New physics investigations that promote scientific inquiry and deeper conceptual understanding. How might we best prepared high school physics students in the understanding, knowledge and skills to execute the science investigations? This group is committed to fostering collaboration among educators to enhance physics instruction through hands-on, student-centered learning experiences.  Our goals are to 1. Strengthen teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical skills in physics teaching in the area of using investigations are part of instruction.  We will use current resources to enhance our knowledge in this area; and 2. Develop, test, and refine NGSS-aligned physics investigations that are accessible and engaging for diverse learners.

Mission Possible: Figuring Out Fluency

PLT co-facilitated by Rachelle Hathaway and Ron Perry

How might we use the tasks and activities to deepen students' conceptual understanding and strategic flexibility in math? This PLT will bring together K–6 educators interested in deepening their understanding of how students develop fluency by exploring tasks from Figuring Out Fluency: Ten Foundations for Reasoning and Strategies with Whole Numbers. Participants will engage in collaborative reading and discussion of the text, try out selected routines or activities with their students, and reflect on student thinking and instructional outcomes. By the end of the cycle, participants will have a shared set of fluency strategies, a deeper understanding of the ten foundations, and an action plan for implementation within their classrooms and grade teams.

Physics Olympics Outreach

PLT co-facilitated by Jennifer Gazdovich and Joel May

How might we develop and use competitive physics and engineering challenges in our Physics Classroom to enhance student learning and motivation? In this outreach group we will meet monthly to develop and revise physics and engineering challenges that have a friendly competitive feel and that meet the curriculum in a regents physics classroom. We will develop clear scoring that schools can use across our area to motivate the teachers to use these activities with their students. At the end of the school year, we will organize a Physics Olympics event at the Buffalo State campus open to middle and high school students. Our target audience is physics teachers and possibly middle school science or engineering teachers.

Science in Our Lives: Exploring and Preparing for Students' Future

PLT co-facilitated by Arianne Dunlap and Mike Dunlap

The focus of this group will be to create cluster questions using real world data that can be used to help prepare students for the new NYS curriculum.   We will discuss how to create questions, what data  we need to create questions,  what makes a good cluster question and more.  These cluster questions will be shared with other local science teachers so that they can use them in their classroom to help prepare their students for the new NYS science final exams.  We will  be looking to do a site visit to get inspiration from  real businesses,  collect real world data from the visit and  create  questions that relate to real life phenomena.    This group is open to all K-12 educators.  The data collected can be differentiated for all grade levels as we work together to  teach our students how to become real world problem solvers and start creating a library of questions that can be used over all disciplines.

SCOPE Collegial Circle

PLT co-facilitated by Stephen Johnson and Christina Randazzo

How might we utilize the combined experience of classroom teachers and Buffalo State University resources to help support pre-service teachers as they prepare to become our colleagues and successful teachers? This Collegial Circle will utilize Buffalo State University resources and personnel to support pre-service teachers during early field and student teaching placements. Our central objective is to explore and identify best mentoring practices for supporting growth in our pre-service teachers. Our target audience consists of teachers actively working with pre-service teachers during early field experience and/or student teaching. In addition, we plan to meet with Buffalo State University supervisors to help identify key learning outcomes and possibly work to develop strategies to share with pre-service teachers to help navigate the complexities of the job search including the interview process.

The Happy Classroom

PLT facilitated by Ariana Ausanio

How might we infuse joy into learning and elevate the experience of students at school to promote higher levels of creativity, productivity, and engagement? This PLT will deepen our understanding of the connection between emotion and learning and the importance of joy in the classroom. As we explore and analyze resources we will implement practices in the classroom that create an environment where all students not only feel welcome and safe, but feel joyful and excited to be in. All teachers and students can feel happy at school and we will create and identify tools, resources and methods that make the classroom a more joyful place for all students. 

TRU Science

PLT co-facilitated by Samantha Stone and Makenzie Scrader

How might we align the math TRU framework as a science framework? Our goal is to continue our work of responding to each other's classroom instruction through video review of how we are meeting the specific TRU targets within our lessons, and how we can better align our lessons to meet those targets. Our current group plans to continue this work as we have done the last two years by working through two final targets, including the science and formative assessment.

Past PLTs

  • Algebra Strings
  • Ambitious Science Thinking in Practice
  • Amplify
  • Analyzing Instruction in Mathematics
  • AP Chemistry
  • Big Science Uploads
  • Building Math Minds Through Productive Math Struggle 
  • Building Math Problem Solvers Through Daily Routines (K-5) & (5-8)
  • Building Thinking Classrooms in Practice (K-6) & (7-12)
  • Calculus Sharing
  • Climate Science in the Classroom K-12
  • Coaching
  • Common Language
  • Computer Science
  • Desmos, BTC, TRU, and YOU!
  • Developing Engaged Thinkers in the Math Classroom
  • Developing 3 Dimensional Lessons with an In-Depth Study of the CCC
  • Drones in STEM Education
  • Engineering Design Challenge
  • Environmental Place-Based Learning
  • Exploring the Relevance of Math in the Workplace
  • Flipped Classroom
  • Gamification in Technology
  • GIS in the Classroom
  • Growth Mindset in the Math Classroom
  • HHMI Biointeractive Resources for 3D Lesson Development
  • Hybrid Math Instruction
  • Hybrid Science Instruction
  • International Teacher Professional Development 
  • Literacy
  • Make
  • Manifest
  • Mathematical Investigations
  • Mathematics Sharing
  • Mentoring
  • Physics and Math
  • Post Pandemic Teaching
  • Problem Posing and Problem Solving
  • Science Learning From Wherever
  • SEL and DEI&B in STEM
  • Social Emotional Learning 
  • STEM Educational Resources
  • STEM Hikes
  • STEM Leadership
  • Storyline Science
  • Teacher Networking Team
  • Teaching Earth Science/Living Environment Remotely
  • Using Learning Theory to Enhance Student Learning & Motivation
  • Virtual Instruction for Living Environment