The road to success is not meant to be traveled alone.

Executive Coaching

Leading a school or district can be the loneliest job in education. The decisions are relentless, the stakes are high, and there’s rarely anyone in the building who truly understands the weight you carry. That’s where executive coaching changes everything.

With 37 years of experience as a classroom teacher, principal, assistant superintendent, and district leader, I’ve sat in your chair. I’ve navigated staff conflicts, board politics, budget shortfalls, angry parents, and the daily pressure of knowing that every decision you make affects students. As a Maxwell Leadership Executive Director and certified coach, I combine that frontline experience with proven leadership principles to help you lead with greater clarity, confidence, and purpose.

Individual Coaching

Confidential – One-on-One Support for School and District Leaders

Whether you’re a first-year principal finding your footing or a superintendent navigating complex district challenges, individual coaching gives you a trusted thinking partner who has been where you are.

Every coaching relationship begins with the Maxwell Leadership DISC Personality Assessment — a powerful tool that reveals your unique behavioral style across four dimensions: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. Through a personal debriefing session, you’ll gain clear insight into your natural leadership strengths, communication tendencies, blind spots, and how your style impacts the people you lead. But DISC doesn’t stop with self-awareness. You’ll also learn to recognize the behavioral styles of the people around you — your teachers, staff, parents, and supervisors — so you can adapt your communication to connect with them the way they need to be communicated with. This skill alone transforms leadership effectiveness, because the best leaders don’t communicate in a way that’s comfortable for themselves — they communicate in a way that reaches the person in front of them.

Understanding your DISC profile and learning to read others becomes the foundation for everything we work on together — because leadership, at its core, is about influence, and influence starts with connection.

From there, we’ll build a coaching plan tailored to your specific goals and circumstances. Sessions may focus on leadership development through Maxwell Leadership principles, navigating difficult staff conversations, building school culture, strengthening your leadership team, managing change, or whatever challenge is keeping you up at night. Coaching sessions are conducted virtually or on-site with ongoing support and accountability.

Group Coaching

Before any group coaching begins, every team member completes the Maxwell Leadership DISC Personality Assessment and receives a confidential one-on-one debriefing session. This ensures that each person walks into the first team session with a clear understanding of their own leadership style — and ready to learn how their teammates are wired. That individual foundation makes the group work exponentially more powerful.

When leadership teams grow together, schools and districts transform. Group coaching brings your administrative team into a shared learning experience where the collective wisdom in the room multiplies. Through facilitated discussion, Maxwell Leadership content, and practical application to your specific school or district context, your team develops a common leadership language, stronger communication, and the cohesion needed to move your organization forward.

Group coaching is available on-site or virtually and is ideal for principal cohorts, district leadership teams, or schools investing in building leadership capacity at every level.

Contact me for further information on coaching

School Success Data

Reduce your office referrals; increase your scores

The success of Time To Teach has been published in Leadership magazine. Read Order in the Classroom, a published article written by Kelly Graham, National Director at the Center for Teacher Effectiveness and Elsbeth Prigmore, high school principal. Time To Teach is a consistent classroom management system that saves instructional time and improves school climate.
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“During my first two years as principal of Clark Street Elementary School, we experienced over 300 office referrals and over 150 out-of-school suspensions! This year we implemented Rick’s strategies and so far we have only had two office referrals in six weeks!”

John Hargrove, Principal, Clark Street Elementary, North Carolina

“Lawton Public Schools is a lower socioeconomic school district in Oklahoma that services 17,000 Pre-K through 12th grade students, over half of which are minority. Twenty-nine of our thirty-five schools were trained using the Time To Teach strategies, affecting more than 11,000 children. Following training, we experienced a 16% decrease in suspensions and office referrals and a dramatic decrease in pupil enrollment for Behavior Intervention and Behavior Disorder classes. We have also seen a 9% increase in test scores and none of our schools are on the school improvement list for No Child Left Behind.”

Billy Davis, Executive Director Elementary Education, Lawton Public Schools, Oklahoma

“We have used the Time To Teach strategies for eighteen years! These strategies allowed me to get into the classrooms and help teachers instead of having to deal with a line of students awaiting discipline intervention. Time To Teach truly delivers on its promise to gain back valuable teaching time that is so often lost to matters of discipline.”

Lynette Hedden, Retired Principal, Richland, Washington

“The number of student referrals in our middle school has dropped 30% on average, every year over the past three years. It is because of Time to Teach that I can say with pride, “Every day I teach!”

Keith Johnson, Teacher/Technology Director, Reading Community Schools, Michigan

“I have seen some of my students move up from Special Education and Title Programs to achieve at grade level performance. My referrals have been eliminated. Students that were never able to do so before are now meeting benchmark standards and making dramatic gains in reading and writing fluency. After 19 years as an educator, I finally have Time To Teach with care and compassion.”

Libba Sager, Elementary Teacher, Toledo Elementary, Oregon

“I have seen a 15 point gain in math and science scores on the state standardized test, which helped our school meet its AYP/API, and I have not sent a single student to the office all year. Time To Teach has helped me successfully teach second language learners, children with ADD, ADHD, Tourettes, learning disabilities, disenfranchised youth, and impoverished students.”

James Turner, Middle School Teacher, Lompoc, California

“At Lompoc Valley Middle School, the referral numbers for class disruption were reduced by 62% using Time to Teach strategies, and Lompoc High School’s referral numbers were lower than those of the rival high school for the first time ever.”

Carrie Chase, High School Counselor, Lahainaluna High School, Hawaii

“Pioneer Continuation High School has our district’s highest number of at-risk 11th and 12th grade students. Using the Time to Teach blueprint, we saw school suspensions drop from 39% to 18% over a three-year period, in-house suspensions cut in half, and significant increases in passing rates on the California High School Exit Exam and other student achievement measures. Overall, the school has experienced a positive, systemic cultural change.”

Elsbeth Prigmore, Principal, Pioneer Continuation High School, California