BRAINTREE -- Eileen McLaughlin, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Archdiocese of Boston, compares being a new teacher at a Catholic school to "drinking from the fire hose."

"I think many teachers always have that sense of excitement," she said. "I know I did."

Her first Catholic school teaching job was in 1998 at St. Ann School in Somerville.

"It was overwhelming, because I wanted to do well," she said. "No teacher comes into a classroom wanting to not do well. But there's so many things to manage, there's so many operational pieces to manage, and so I think the work can be overwhelming."

At the Lynch Leadership Academy, a Boston College program for school principals, McLaughlin found that every Catholic school's success starts in the classroom. When she became the archdiocese's superintendent in 2024, she wanted to establish "a helpful approach to supporting teachers," including faith formation and communication with parents and students.

To do that, she and the Catholic Schools Office developed the McNeice Academy, a five-day series of training sessions for new Catholic school teachers in the archdiocese.

The McNeice Academy, named after the McNeice Foundation that funded its creation, held its first session from Aug. 18 to Aug. 22 at the Pastoral Center in Braintree. Fifty kindergarten- through eighth-grade teachers representing 22 of the archdiocese's Catholic schools attended. All of them have been teaching for less than three years. Fifteen teachers are on a waiting list for future sessions.

"I want them to have a sense of community," McLaughlin said.

On Aug. 18, the teachers attended Mass together, learned about spiritual leadership, and received a history lesson about the archdiocese from Head Archivist Violet Hurst.

"There's a sense of excitement about being a part of something so big," McLaughlin said.

When Mary Bridget Chick, the Catholic Schools Office's director of teacher development, first began working in the archdiocese's Catholic schools in 2002, she had a "wonderful school community of mentors." She now wants to provide the same for a new generation of teachers.

"It's only because of that community that I find myself in this role 20 years later," she said, "but I also think that if I had something like this 20 years ago, my growth would have been a little bit of an easier path and would have happened more quickly."

The Aug. 19 and 20 sessions focused on instructional leadership, and the Aug. 21 and 22 sessions focused on executive management. On Aug. 20, Devon Holt, director of the Early Childhood Center at St. Mary of the Hills School in Milton, gave an instructional presentation about how teachers can use test result data to improve their lesson plans.

Holt said that the teachers could think of data as a game and as an incentive to do better. Students need incentives to improve their test scores, she said, and the same logic applies to teacher performance.

"Do not stress," she said. "It gets easier."

The teachers were asked to look at their own classrooms' Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) MAP Growth data. MAP is a series of standardized tests that measure students' academic growth over the school year.

"It's going to help you understand all of your students," she said. "It's going to guide your instruction within the classroom, and it's going to foster that supportive and effective learning environment."

She said the MAP data holds both teachers and students accountable.

"All of our students learn differently," she said. "You always need to make sure that you are reaching out to all your students."

She said that the most successful students need to be challenged as much as the least successful students need to be helped along.

"You need to seek out every single person, and you need to develop instruction for every single person so that every single person grows," she said.

The teachers did an exercise where they observed their students' MAP data for areas needing improvement, and brainstormed ways they could change their lesson plans to improve test scores.

Abby Lacroix, who is starting her third year as a first-grade teacher at St. Monica School in Methuen, found that her students' reading scores are strong, but there's "room for improvement" with math.

"I know that problem solving and word problems are always a big hot topic in math instruction, so I would definitely try and go through more problem-solving methods next year," she said.

She joined the McNeice Academy to connect with other new teachers.

"I've gotten to meet a lot of awesome people, and I feel like I've gotten a lot of instructional strategies and things like that," she said.

Kaylin Ciesluk, starting her third year as a sixth- through eighth-grade ELA teacher at St. Anthony School in Everett, said she learned "not to be scared" of the data. She is considering doing more grammar warmups for her students this fall. Before St. Anthony's, she taught at a public school in Connecticut.

"The biggest thing is -- especially going from a public to a Catholic school -- is to realize that I can use Jesus as the best teacher," she said, "and look at his teaching styles and study him and see how he taught everybody, with what we're doing today and how I can use the Catholic principles more within our learning."

Delilah Demopoulos, a fifth-grade math, science, and religion teacher beginning her second year at St. John Paul II Catholic Academy Lower Mills in Dorchester, signed up for the McNeice Academy so she could improve her skills and meet other teachers.

She said she was "really excited" looking at her class data. At first, she was disappointed by the students who didn't meet their goals, but between the winter exam and spring exam of the 2024-2025 school year, 76 percent of her students saw improved scores.

"That, for me as a first-year teacher, was a release of the tension, a release of a breath," she said. "Like, okay, I can do this. I want to continue to work on the practices that I have now and continue to build on to the advice of the seasoned teachers around me."

Demopoulos was especially interested in the Aug. 19 training session, which was about the importance of bonding with students.

"It's very important to have structured, meaningful, effective instruction," she said, "but it's hard to get the kids to actually engage if they don't feel like there's a connection, if they don't feel like they can trust you."

As the teachers learned and discussed together in the Pastoral Center's auditorium, they were watched by a cardboard cutout of Luce, the mascot of the Jubilee Year of 2025.

Chick said that in Luce, a "pilgrim of hope," she sees "all of the hope and potential in every student that comes our way."

"I see the same thing in our teachers, and just like we want to journey with our students in their growth, professional development is the same path we walk together to grow as educators," she said.