Opinion | The Post-Pandemic Demands on Teachers 

In July, September, and December 2023, the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, convened the High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession, which met to discuss transforming education. Much of this summit focused on teachers because they are considered “the backbone of all quality educational systems,” and society undervalues them. This theme is not new; since 2018 at the Observatory, we have discussed how the profession has lost prestige and the crisis it currently experiences. 

The summit’s report, entitled United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession, highlighted the importance of teachers, noting that “they are critical to nurturing each country’s greatest resource: the minds of its people.” The current reality is there is a shortage of educators in the world; moreover, teachers lack continuous training, something observed during the pandemic, which is why the panel focused on recommendations and a call to action to “ensure that every student has access to a professionally trained, qualified, and well-supported teacher.” 

The pandemic significantly altered the education system, intensified teachers’ workloads, forced them to suddenly change how they teach, and pressured them to learn and use new technologies. However, as the UN focuses on the issue, there needs to be more discussion about how this event continues to increase labor demand and societal pressure on educators. 

Within weeks of the pandemic’s start, teaching and learning migrated to remote modalities, even though many teachers had never taught online and lacked knowledge of online pedagogical approaches and basic technology skills, leaving them feeling unprepared and overwhelmed. In Australia, for example, teachers experienced decreased morale, burnout, low self-efficacy, and a perceived lack of support. 

Distance learning and educational technology took on urgent and renewed relevance due to the abrupt shift to online education caused by the pandemic; various technologies and platforms emerged to support the online modality. Although for some, the pandemic provided an opportunity to innovate and experiment, it was an emotional and psychological burden for others. As the world recovers from this disastrous event, it should take time to reflect on the changes produced in educational systems, the significantly increased workload on educators, and the impact of the new global trends. 

While the pandemic arguably generated an “unprecedented opportunity to transform education into integrated systems” and the potential to reimagine the role of digital technologies in educational delivery models, little research has been done on how this event increased schools’ use of technology in education and its implications for the organization and execution of teachers’ work. In addition, the research has not discussed how technology is reshaping teachers’ jobs; it primarily focuses on integrating or using it.

Aware of the need to investigate the subject, professors Mihajla Gavin and Susan McGrath-Champ wrote a publication entitled Teacher Workload and the Organization of Work: A Research Agenda for a Post-pandemic Future. It focuses specifically on public education in New South Wales. Their research analyzed patterns occurring in the work world, such as remote work, automation, and the increased tasks that teachers must carry out to understand what is happening in their profession. To begin their research, Gavin and McGrath-Champ asked, “To what extent has COVID fundamentally altered (or could alter) educational delivery and enduring notions of face-to-face learning in school education? Also, how have the changes shaped the organization of teachers’ work and impacted their workload?” They explained that many schools are experimenting with hybrid forms of learning, such as in Queensland, Australia, and Missouri in the United States, which have introduced and tested a four-day school week to save teachers time and manage costs and staff shortages. 

In addition, the New South Wales Department of Education created a program called “Quality Time,” which has repositories of lesson planning materials to support class preparation and save teachers time. Other places are experimenting with artificial intelligence to automate repetitive tasks and standardize processes so educators can work more efficiently and effectively. These innovations can potentially impact how teachers do their work and change. 

The pandemic caused a rethinking of teaching methods and intensified societal expectations of teachers that they must always be available and working. One of Mihajla Gavin’s and Susan McGrath-Champ’s interviewees commented, “It’s crazy; it seems endless, like you’re constantly in front of your computer.” 

To address this, New South Wales and Queensland regulators are creating policies to give teachers the right to disconnect digitally; something that seems surreal is having legislation to limit their work time to personal time; however, it is necessary. This measure is expected to be in force throughout Australia. Although it is good that educational institutions and politicians seek to change and improve the education system, the endurance of these measures and their effects on teaching workloads remain to be seen, and, above all, if they redirect attention to what is most important: teaching. 

These examples and many other innovations have been criticized for their inability to effectively address the problem of teacher workload. Many of these “solutions” focus on reducing the number of hours or providing sets of lesson plans, i.e., the workload aspect; however, they do not help resolve the pressures in teachers’ work.  It is often unquestioned that technology is pedagogically beneficial for both teachers and students; however, more critical perspectives reveal that these technologies can devalue the work of teachers or complicate and make their work more challenging. Technology can help make teaching more manageable but does not reduce the workload. 

Jaime L. Beck, an instructor at the University of Calgary, wrote in 2017 about teachers’ work intensification, describing it as “heavy hours,” as educators continuously feel pulled in different directions by contradictory and competing demands at any time. This results in desertion, little interest in teaching as a career, and work dissatisfaction among many professionals. School leaders also experience heavy workloads, as they must manage the school, do marketing and fundraising, and deal with legal issues, leaving little time for educational leadership.

The increase in workload and the intensification of teachers’ work are contextually associated with policy changes that characterize the commodification of education. The Ministry of Public Education in Mexico (SEP) points out that the objective of education has seemingly changed from seeking “to contribute to the formation of free, participatory, responsible and informed citizens, capable of exercising and defending their rights, who actively participate in social, economic and political life” to pursuing a private economic good. 

The policy changes demand heavier and more intense job performance from educators. Their work has become performative under constant quantification and measurement. Teaching work continuously changes; new initiatives, programs, reports, and technologies exist, but more information is needed on whether these variations work well. In addition, institutions face reduced funding for support services to help leaders and teachers deliver high-quality education.  

Workload accumulation and intensification negatively affect educators’ health and well-being. They have little time to rest because they must take their work home and feel the obligation to always be available, leaving them physically and emotionally exhausted.  Intensified work affects educators’ ability to achieve education’s core priorities. This raises the need for policy interventions to address workload and work intensification and recognize and mitigate the “time poverty” experienced by teachers. Time poverty produces subjective experiences of stress, burnout, and job satisfaction among professionals.

In addition, during the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were overwhelmed by the lack of preparation to teach remotely and had to deal with students’ social-emotional needs. While necessary, this added one more layer of exhaustion, especially as society saw it as a duty of the teaching profession. 

The UN panel emphasized improving teachers’ working conditions by offering adequate salaries, decent working conditions, stable contracts, access to technology and resources, and professional development opportunities. They highlighted that improving the material conditions of teachers is essential to guarantee the quality of education, educators’ well-being, and the dignity of the teaching profession. However, the current crisis facing teachers is nothing new; it seems that instead of improving, things have worsened, mainly due to the pandemic.

More research is clearly needed on the subject. Knowing which measures work effectively and which do not will allow teachers to focus on their most important job, which is educating.

Translated by Daniel Wetta

Paulette Delgado

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0