Over the last few months I've had a version of the same conversation in staff rooms, at conferences, and in quiet corridors after PD sessions. It usually starts with someone being honest with me, which I always appreciate.

"Look, I think instructional coaching is probably good. I'm just not sure it's for us right now. We've already got a lot on."

I've heard that so many times now that I've stopped treating it as a one-off. It's a pattern. And the pattern is telling me something important.

A lot of really good educators and leaders still see instructional coaching as a program. An add-on or something you bolt onto an already full plate, that competes with everything else for time and energy. When it's framed that way, hesitation isn't resistance, it is completely rational.

The people saying this weren't sceptical about coaching itself. Being curious, after pressing and following up more, they'd tell me about a conversation with a coach, mentor or leader that changed how they taught, or a colleague who watched them teach and asked one question that unlocked something. They believed in this but they seemed to doubt the packaging.

That gap is what this next week is about.

For the next seven days I'm going to make a single argument, one piece at a time. Instructional coaching is not a program you add to the pile. It's the enabler that makes everything already on the pile actually work. (And, it works alongside - and within - those other focus areas or priorities).

Especially right now, in Victorian schools, where the pile is genuinely excellent. VTLM 2.0, MTSS, the HITS, the High Impact Wellbeing Strategies, inclusive practice. We have never had clearer guidance about what good can look like. What we've never quite cracked is how it consistently makes it into classrooms.

That's the question I want to sit in this week. Not whether the frameworks or models are sound. They are. For me, the harder or stickier question is what turns a framework, practice, strategy or model into a teacher's actual practice on a Tuesday morning...or a Friday afternoon!

I have a view on the answer, formed over years of getting it both right and wrong while teaching and coaching in schools, alongside my more recent work across systems, networks and schools in all sectors over the last 4 years. I'll lay it out across the week, including the parts where it didn't work - but new learning and wisdom has resulted from it.

For today, I just want to name the thing I keep hearing, because naming it matters.

If you've felt that quiet uncertainty about instructional coaching, the sense that it's one more initiative you don't have room for, you are not being difficult. A perspective is that you're responding sensibly to how it's often presented - or just can feel like it's being presented.

Because it isn't a program and it's definitely not a one off workshop.

My hope this week is to add to the thinking and ways people might see it. Or better, to stop selling it as a thing at all, and show it for what it actually is.

So let me start with a question.

When you hear "instructional coaching," do you picture a program?

Or do you picture a person who helped you get better? Or a way of working that's connected to your classroom and supports you and your experience?

Hold that distinction. We'll come back to it in the next one.