Educational leadership sits at the intersection of every tension in a district. In the summer, the noise drops. Fewer board meetings. No parent escalations. No crisis calls before sunrise. What remains is the work that only leaders can do: think about what the district is becoming, not just what it is managing.

Most of us fill that silence with logistics. We treat summer as an operational pause, a chance to catch up on the things we didn't get to in May. What we rarely do is use the stillness to ask the questions underneath the work.

Early in my time as superintendent, I led a district-wide shift from STEM to STEAM. The decision to add the arts wasn't simply pedagogical fashion. It came from sitting with a harder question: what were we actually saying about learning when we left the arts out? Around the same time, we built a K-12 computer science curriculum from the ground up, not because a mandate required it, but because I kept asking why we were preparing students for a world that no longer existed in our classrooms. Those decisions didn't come from the budget cycle. They came from a kind of stillness that August made possible.

Carl Jung wrote about the collective unconscious as the layer of the psyche that carries inherited patterns, ones we did not choose and rarely examine (Jung, 1968). Organizations have the same layer. Peter Senge (1990) called them mental models: the deeply ingrained assumptions and generalizations that influence how we understand the world and how we take action within it. In schools and districts, these mental models are everywhere, invisible precisely because they are so familiar.

Why do we start school at 7:30 AM? Why does the master schedule look the way it does? Why do we keep a program that the data stopped supporting a decade ago? These are not policy questions. They are mythological ones. They were inherited, not chosen. And they stay in place not because they work, but because no one has had enough stillness to question them honestly.

The Difference Between Managing and Becoming

Howard Gardner (2007) argued that the synthesizing mind, one capable of integrating ideas from different disciplines into a coherent whole, is among the most essential capacities a leader can develop in a complex world. That synthesis is exactly what summer demands of educational leaders, and what most of us avoid.

Lev Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development reminds us that growth happens at the edge of what we already know (Vygotsky, 1978). That principle applies to institutions as much as it does to learners. A district that only manages its existing beliefs never reaches the edge. It stays inside what it already knows.

The leaders who use August well are not the ones who complete the most tasks. They are the ones who surface the questions their institutions have been too busy to ask.

What It Means to Put a Belief Down

Putting an inherited belief down is not the same as abandoning tradition. It is a deliberate act of examination. You pick it up. You look at it honestly. You ask whether it is earning its place. Then you decide.

When I made the decision to move from STEM to STEAM, the pushback was immediate. The belief I was questioning was not just curricular. It was cultural. It said: rigor lives in math and science. The arts are enrichment. Putting that belief down meant replacing it with something harder to measure but more honest about what learning actually requires.

Senge (1990) was direct about the difficulty of this work: surfacing and testing mental models is among the hardest and most necessary things an organization can do. That work does not happen in a board meeting. It does not happen in a budget negotiation. It happens in the quiet, when a leader is willing to hold a question long enough to actually examine it.

The Challenge

Before September arrives, identify one belief your district has been carrying without examining. Not a policy. Not a practice. A belief. The assumption underneath the practice. Ask where it came from. Ask whether it is still true. Ask what it would mean to put it down.

That question alone may be the most important work you do this summer.

References

Gardner, H. (2007). Five minds for the future. Harvard Business School Press.

Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday.

Valentino, L. R. (2025). Thought leadership in education: A comprehensive exploration of transformative educational ideas. Valgar LLC.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

This week's issue asks you to examine the beliefs your institution has been carrying without questioning. This essay takes that same challenge personally. When Luis Valentino stepped away from the superintendency in 2025, he didn't retire from education. He put down one set of inherited beliefs about what educational leadership looks like and picked up a harder, more honest question: what does this work become when you strip away the position? That decision shaped everything Valgar LLC is building today. If you are in a season of stillness and wondering what to carry forward, this piece is worth your time.

Systems Thinking and Organizational Tansformation

Chapter 4 speaks directly to this week's argument. Valentino writes that educational institutions are not machines to be fixed part by part. They are living systems, shaped by culture, relationships, and feedback loops that resist easy change. The chapter draws on Peter Senge's five disciplines and the concept of mental models to help leaders see the assumptions embedded in their organizations, not as inevitable realities, but as inherited structures that can be examined and changed. If you have been asking why your district keeps doing things the same way, this chapter gives you the framework to answer that question honestly.

This week: Read the "Mental Models" and "Applying Systems Thinking" sections in Chapter 4. Then ask yourself: What is one mental model in my organization that has never been put to a vote, but shapes every decision we make?

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