Maria Rivera

Maria works as a coach for the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence. She has been trained in the RULER Approach for social and emotional learning and as a Star Factor Leadership coach. Maria has been working with school leaders and school leadership teams in urban and suburban Connecticut schools developing emotional intelligence skills for transformational school leadership.

Maria is a retired New York City Public School educator with an extensive career as a former teacher, assistant principal and principal of an elementary school. As NYC educator and school leader, Maria worked in ethnically diverse elementary schools with low academic achievement and striking emotional and behavioral issues. Under her compassionate leadership and her ability to communicate effectively and gain the trust and cooperation of others, she was able to bring the school community together, creating a more positive and congenial school climate that led to improved academic and personal achievement in children, parents and teachers. After relocating to Connecticut, she obtained CT. Certification in Administration and Supervision, and held the positions of Director of World Languages with Stamford Public Schools and Director of Student Teaching and Internships with the School of Education at the University of Bridgeport. Maria has been and remains a strong advocate of the responsibility to educate the whole child, and create a marriage between competencies in both social-emotional learning and cognitive learning in order to create happier and caring people in our world.

In addition to her extensive and rewarding career in education, Maria is a life-long learner. She loves to write fiction and personal essays. Maria recently participated in the Sixth Annual Yale Writers’ Conference and continues to improve her writing taking courses at the Westport Writers’ Workshop. Maria lives in Branford, CT and has a son who is a Senior at Yale.

What Maria loves most about coaching are the trusting, personal relationships she develops with her clients; school leaders. She enjoys helping and guiding them to self-reflect and develop self-awareness on daily emotions and feelings in order to determine how they impact their performance as school leaders and affect their daily life.