Technology is Supposed to Decrease Teacher Burnout—It Can Sometimes Make ItWorse
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Our findings were based on a survey of 779 U.S. teachers conducted in May 2022, along with subsequent focus groups that took place in the fall of that year. Our study was peer-reviewed and published in April 2024.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools across the country were under lockdown orders, schools adopted new technologies to facilitate remote learning during the crisis. These technologies included learning management systems, which are online platforms that help educators organize and keep track of their coursework.
We were puzzled to find that teachers who used a learning management system such as Canvas or Schoology reported higher levels of burnout. Ideally, these tools should have simplified their jobs. We also thought these systems would improve teachers' ability to organize documents and assignments, mainly because they would house everything digitally, and thus, reduce the need to print documents or bring piles of student work home to grade.
But in the follow-up focus groups we conducted, the data told a different story. Instead of being used to replace old ways of completing tasks, the learning management systems were simply another thing on teachers' plates.
A telling example was seen in lesson planning. Before the pandemic, teachers typically submitted hard copies of lesson plans to administrators. However, once school systems introduced learning management systems, some teachers were expected to not only continue submitting paper plans but to also upload digital versions to the learning management system using a completely different format.
Asking teachers to adopt new tools without removing old requirements is a recipe for burnout.
[...] If new technology is being adopted to help teachers do their jobs, then school leaders need to make sure it will not add extra work for them. If it adds to or increases teachers' workloads, then adding technology increases the likelihood that a teacher will burn out. This likely compels more teachers to leave the field.
Schools that implement new technologies should make sure that they are streamlining the job of being a teacher by offsetting other tasks, and not simply adding more work to their load.
The broader lesson from this study is that teacher well-being should be a primary focus with the implementation of schoolwide changes.
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