It started in kindergarten, with an award for asking the most questions.

After a while, a pattern became impossible to ignore. Students were doing work. Pages were filled in, hands were raised, answers were given. But underneath it, most of the time, we were only covering the surface.

I started asking students two questions, the same two, over and over.

That gap, between what we were assigning and what students actually wanted from us, is where this all started.

I've always been curious, walking into a classroom, about what a student already knew before the lesson started. Their background. Their thinking. What they'd bring if we gave them the room to explain it, debate it, defend it.

Too often, a lesson would end with a shallow "how do you know that," and we'd move on to the next question while as much as 80 percent of the class was still lost. Nobody caught it, because nobody was really asking.

I've worked with a lot of different principal teams focused on student-centered practices, and we kept coming back to the same patterns in the same classrooms, visit after visit.

The question was never really "how do we get every teacher to change." It was, what is one thing you'd want your teachers to try, maybe ten minutes somewhere in a lesson, not the whole lesson, something everyone on the team could practice and actually measure.

That's when it became doable. Not a full overhaul. One team, one shift, ten minutes, watched closely enough to know if it worked.

I always believed teachers were the experts. They already had the knowledge. What they needed wasn't another outside consultant they didn't trust telling them what to do. They needed a system, honest feedback, and a shared sense of what we were actually looking for.

That belief is where The Question-Driven Principal came from, and it's the same belief Lead Spark Team is built on.

Three books, including The Question-Driven Principal and Spark Curiosity: A Guide to Quick Inquiry Tasks, both born out of the same classrooms and the same questions.

Lead Spark Team exists because a book can change how you think, but a principal still needs a way to practice it, team by team, week by week, with real feedback instead of a binder.

I want a principal to feel confident coaching any teacher, in any subject, math, social studies, American history, without needing to be a content expert in all of them.

Because the thing I'm asking every leader to look for is the same thing everywhere: the depth of a student's thinking. How they explain it. How they defend it. What they can show you, not just tell you, they've mastered.

My hope is that principals stop spending their hours reading about systems and building spreadsheets to track them, and start spending those hours where it actually matters, in classrooms, coaching teachers, and giving them the kind of support they've always deserved.

That's what Lead Spark Team is for.

Olivia Odileke

Founder & Chief Curiosity Officer, Kampus Insights CC, Inc.