Imagine for a moment that you’re on an episode of Family Feud. You’re up on stage in the final round, and the host Steve Harvey asks the following:

“Name something that a teacher does.”

This one’s easy! They teach. Number one answer. You and your family win the show and get to take a well-deserved vacation with your winnings!

But anyone who has spent time in a school knows that teaching is only part of the job. 

There are lessons to prepare, student work to assess, families to contact, meetings to attend, data to review, accommodations to make, professional learning to complete and countless other responsibilities that happen before students arrive, after they leave and in the spaces between classes.

All of these tasks are important, and many are critical parts of high-quality teaching. But taken together, it raises a deceptively simple question:

How much work are we asking teachers to fit into a finite amount of time?

This question is the focus of a new statewide survey from the Kentucky Department of Education and the starting point for a broader conversation about teacher well-being in Kentucky.

What We Already Know About Teacher Workload

National research gives us good reason to pay attention to how teachers spend their time.

In 2025, U.S. public school teachers reported working an average of 49 hours per week, compared with 44 hours among similar working adults (those adults with a bachelor’s degree who work in fields outside of K-12 education). Teachers also reported working about 10 hours more per week than they were contracted to work.

It is important to note that not all workloads are the same. Two teachers may both work 45 hours a week, but may use that time very differently. One may have dedicated time for planning and preparing lessons during the school day. Another may spend that time supervising classes and then spend their time planning and grading at home.

Workload, in other words, is not only about how much time teachers spend working. It is a broader picture of what fills that time, when the work happens and whether teachers have enough time to complete the work they believe is most important.

Research has consistently associated high workload and time pressure with greater teacher stress and burnout and lower job satisfaction. Together, these findings make teacher workload part of a broader conversation about working conditions, teacher well-being and retention.

What We Don’t Know About Teacher Workload in Kentucky

National research can tell us a great deal about the teaching profession, but it cannot tell us what exactly teacher workload looks like in Kentucky today. We still have several important questions:

• How much time do Kentucky teachers spend planning, grading and preparing for instruction? 
• How much work happens during the contracted day—and how much follows teachers home? 
• Which responsibilities consume the most time? 
• How much dedicated time for planning and preparing lessons do teachers actually have? 
• And how do those experiences differ across grade levels, subjects, years of experience and school contexts?

We also want to better understand how changes in the profession may be changing the work itself.

For example, the adoption of high-quality instructional resources can change what planning, preparation and assessment looks like for teachers. Artificial intelligence tools may reduce the time required for some tasks while introducing new forms of work and needs for additional professional judgment. Other responsibilities—from family communication to student support to administrative requirements—may compete for the same limited hours in a teacher’s day.

Currently, Kentucky does not have a detailed statewide picture that answers those questions. 

We aim to change that.

Hearing Directly From Teachers

This month, the Kentucky Department of Education has launched a statewide Teacher Workload Survey to better understand how teachers across the Commonwealth spend their working time.

The survey asks teachers about how they spend their time during and outside the contracted school day, the instructional and non-instructional responsibilities that make up their workload, their access to planning time and the tools and resources they use to accomplish their work.

It also explores emerging questions about the use of artificial intelligence and high-quality instructional resources and how those tools may be changing teacher work.

Teacher voices matter to us!

We want to hear directly from Kentucky teachers about where their time goes, which responsibilities feel manageable, where pressures may be concentrated and how those experiences differ across the profession.

The Kentucky Teacher Workload Survey is for any current Kentucky public school teachers. The survey should take around 15 to 20 minutes to complete and will be open until the end of October. Teachers interested in taking this survey can access the following link: bit.ly/KYTeacherWorkloadSurvey 

Coming Up in the Series

This blog kickstarts a series on Teacher Well-Being. Our next post, Teaching Matters Most: Why Teacher Well-Being Is Critical for Student Success will explore why teachers matter so much for students’ learning, belonging, safety and overall school experience. 

From there, the series will continue examining factors like school climate, leadership, teacher voice, retention and other conditions that shape teacher well-being in Kentucky, before returning later in the series to share what we learned from the Teacher Workload Survey.

Join the Conversation

If you could give Kentucky teachers more time for one part of their work, where would you invest it—and why?

As this survey helps us better understand where teachers’ time goes, we hope this question can also spark conversations in schools and communities about how teacher time is structured, protected and used.