Technology Is Supposed to Decrease Teacher Burnout—It Can Sometimes Make It Worse

Our findings were based connected a survey of 779 U.S. teachers conducted successful May 2022, on with consequent absorption groups that took spot successful the autumn of that year. Our survey was peer-reviewed and published successful April 2024.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, erstwhile schools crossed the state were nether lockdown orders, schools adopted new technologies to facilitate distant learning during the crisis. These technologies included learning absorption systems, which are online platforms that assistance educators signifier and support way of their coursework.

We were puzzled to find that teachers who utilized a learning absorption strategy specified arsenic Canvas oregon Schoology reported higher levels of burnout. Ideally, these tools should person simplified their jobs. We besides thought these systems would amended teachers’ quality to signifier documents and assignments, chiefly due to the fact that they would location everything digitally, and thus, trim the request to people documents oregon bring piles of pupil enactment location to grade.

But successful the follow-up absorption groups we conducted, the information told a antithetic story. Instead of being utilized to regenerate aged ways of completing tasks, the learning absorption systems were simply different happening connected teachers’ plates.

A telling illustration was seen successful acquisition planning. Before the pandemic, teachers typically submitted hard copies of acquisition plans to administrators. However, erstwhile schoolhouse systems introduced learning absorption systems, immoderate teachers were expected to not lone proceed submitting insubstantial plans but to besides upload integer versions to the learning absorption strategy utilizing a wholly antithetic format.

Asking teachers to follow caller tools without removing aged requirements is simply a look for burnout.

Teachers who taught aboriginal simple grades had the astir complaints astir learning absorption systems due to the fact that the systems did not align with wherever their students were at. A kindergarten teacher from Las Vegas shared, “Now granted my kids cannot truly number to 10 erstwhile they archetypal travel in, but they person to larn a six digit pupil number” to entree Canvas. “I decidedly hold that … it does pb to burnout.”

In summation to technology-related concerns, teachers identified different factors specified arsenic administrative support, teacher autonomy and intelligence wellness arsenic predictors of burnout.

Why it matters

Teacher burnout has been a persistent contented successful education, and 1 that became particularly pronounced during and aft the COVID-19 pandemic.

If caller exertion is being adopted to assistance teachers bash their jobs, past schoolhouse leaders request to marque definite it volition not adhd other enactment for them. If it adds to oregon increases teachers’ workloads, past adding exertion increases the likelihood that a teacher volition pain out. This apt compels much teachers to permission the field.

Schools that instrumentality caller technologies should marque definite that they are streamlining the occupation of being a teacher by offsetting different tasks, and not simply adding much enactment to their load.

The broader acquisition from this survey is that teacher well-being should beryllium a superior absorption with the implementation of schoolwide changes.

What’s next

We judge our probe is applicable for not lone learning absorption systems but for different caller technologies, including emerging artificial quality tools. We judge aboriginal probe should place schools and districts that efficaciously integrate caller technologies and larn from their successes.

The Research Brief is simply a abbreviated instrumentality connected absorbing world work.

David T. Marshall, Associate Professor of Educational Research, Auburn University; Teanna Moore, Associate Researcher astatine Accessible Teaching, Learning and Assessment Systems, University of Kansas, and Timothy Pressley, Associate Professor of Psychology, Christopher Newport University

This nonfiction is republished from The Conversation nether a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.