The Workload Solutions the Profession Doesn’t Want

I’m very concerned about teacher workload. Plenty of teachers are running on fumes. In the 2024 State of the American Teacher survey, 59% of teachers reported frequent job-related stress and 60% reported burnout.

Still, I’ve noticed something odd in the workload discourse: the most dependable solutions to reducing workload often turn out to be the ones teachers resist.

Take classroom displays, grading and feedback, behavior systems, even curriculum. Every year, schools explore different ways to lower the burden—and a surprising number of teachers decline or quietly ignore the offer.

The phenomenon isn’t mysterious once you stop treating workload as something you solve by shaving minutes. A lot of what we call “work” in schools is tied up with identity, taste, status, and autonomy. So when leaders offer relief, it doesn’t always feel like support. It can feel like an attempt to hollow out the job.

Here are several workload levers that should be easy wins, and why they so often aren’t.

Decorations and displays

One point I stressed in Just Tell Them is that schools could help teachers out by giving them explicit permission to stop decorating their classrooms. Displays do little for learning, and the busiest rooms have been found to distract students and clog attention. So do yourself a favor, I wrote, and stop coming in on weekends to make your room look like Pinterest.

Better still, make classroom displays and preparation the responsibility of school leaders. They’re in the building after teachers leave for breaks anyway. Let teachers walk into a ready room on day one and spend their scarce prep time prepping—not on bulletin boards.

The reason this isn’t that appealing is simple. Many teachers enjoy this part of their jobs!

For some, the blank classroom is part of the appeal of the profession: a sanctioned canvas, a domain where they get to author the environment.

So while I’d have felt genuinely supported if my school said, “Hey Zach—your room is set; go teach,” other teachers experience that as being deprived of something they value. The workload reduction effort isn’t perceived as a kindness.

Grading and marking

A similar dynamic shows up with marking and grading. Schools—helped along by UK-led conversations in recent years—have tried to remove the expectation that every assignment must be marked in detail. The argument is reasonable: grading everything consumes an enormous amount of time, and much of that time doesn’t convert into learning.

There’s also a serious instructional case for replacing individual written marking with other forms of feedback: whole-class feedback, live verbal feedback, exemplars, responsive reteaching, structured practice with immediate correction. Done well, those approaches can be at least as effective as writing comments that students barely read before burying papers in backpacks.

You’d expect teachers to greet this like a gift. Yet plenty of teachers value marking. They enjoy close contact with student thinking; it’s a way of “seeing” their class.

In the American context there’s an added wrinkle: grading is often used to incentivize effort. Teachers use grades as carrots and sticks, and sometimes with real effect. Some of the strictest graders also run the most effective classrooms.

So when leaders say “we’re reducing grading,” many teachers don’t hear “we’re giving you your evenings back.” They hear “we’re taking away one of your primary tools.” Predictably, they resist, because it doesn’t feel like relief.

Behavior systems

In many posts, I argue for whole-school behavior systems because American schools still treat behavior management as an individual teacher’s private battle. That framing ignores almost everything we know about behavior. It functions systemically. Shared routines, shared language, consistent follow-through by all adults in the building — those collective behaviors do more work than any single teacher’s personality behind a closed door.

Whole-school systems also lighten the load. They distribute responsibility across the staff and anchor much of it to administrators who can enforce rules.

When I’m in the hallway narrating positives and correcting misbehavior, it shouldn’t be just me holding the line. It should be everyone, including the folks with a direct line to parents and the authority to impose consequences. When the system is coherent, it works beautifully, and teachers get to teach.

But teachers often don’t want to participate fully in the bargain. Whole-school behavior requires teamwork, and the culture of teaching remains stubbornly individualistic: shut the door, run your room, don’t tell me what to do. For the strongest classroom managers, that posture sometimes pays off. They don’t want to carry weaker colleagues, and they enjoy the classrooms and autonomy of their own design.

What I find harder to explain is why some of the least effective behavior managers undermine whole-school systems—systems that would make their day materially easier. They don’t want to be told where to stand, what to say, how to correct, how to use rewards and consequences. They would rather be left alone, even when it reliably harms everyone, themselves included. Of everything I observe in schools, this remains the most baffling.

Curriculum and instruction

Workload shrinks when instruction becomes predictable. A stable planning routine—Do Now, clear model, guided practice, independent practice, exit ticket—reduces planning and makes the student experience more streamlined. A teacher can run an effective classroom with a plain toolkit that emphasizes the fundamentals: reading, writing, discussion, practice.

No more weekend printing. No arts-and-crafts store runs. No chasing trends. No pretending you need 30 different lesson plans for 30 different “learning styles.”

And yet predictability is often dismissed as “cookie-cutter.” People want the Grecian Urn lesson. They want spectacle: projects, crafts, mess, the theater of engagement. Where I see teaching as getting powerful ideas into students’ heads, others perceive this as narrowing the purpose of education and limiting autonomy. Workload reduction becomes secondary.

This conflict sharpens further when you mention scripted or centrally planned curriculum. Structured programs reduce workload because they reduce the most expensive cognitive labor in teaching: instructional design. Yes, you still need to preview the materials to deliver them well. But you no longer have to invent the examples, analogies, definitions, practice sets, worksheets, and sequencing—nor reconstruct the cumulative spiral of old and new knowledge every night.

As someone who has taught for years with scripts (far more than the loudest anti-script voices have), I’m perfectly content outsourcing instructional design to people whose job is instructional design. But many teachers got into teaching—apparently—to plan everything themselves. So the workload conversation ends there.

A full restructuring

I was recently introduced to a five-component model of teacher responsibility by Joe Liemont during a visit to Alpha Schools in Austin, Texas. He parses the job into five primary responsibilities: Delivery, Design, Motivation, Parents, and Paperwork.

Alpha’s theory of change is radical in the most practical sense: the job becomes doable once you stop asking teachers to do all five. By narrowing the role until it’s executable, they’ve assembled a workload-reduction strategy that’s unusually comprehensive.

Cut out delivery and design by outsourcing these tasks to technology platforms built by learning scientists, and the job changes immediately. Remove ridiculous paperwork through automation, and the role becomes lighter again. Route parent diplomacy to deans and principals who are structurally positioned for it, and you narrow the job further.

Will the profession accept a version of teaching that abandons some of its traditional responsibilities in exchange for sustainability? Time will tell.

But teachers have been clear about what the current specs produce: chronic stress and creeping responsibilities that only a small subset of people can sustain. The solution to workload may not be to romanticize the old job description, but to rebuild the role so “mere mortals” can succeed at it.