Best questions for teacher survey about planning time

Here are some of the best questions for a teacher survey about planning time, along with tips on crafting effective ones. If you want to generate such a survey in seconds, Specific makes it easy to build and launch a conversation that gets real insights—fast.

The best open-ended questions for a teacher survey about planning time

Open-ended questions are our go-to when we want detail and depth. They let teachers describe their realities beyond boxes and numbers. This is crucial, given that U.S. teachers work about 52 hours per week, but less than half of that is spent on direct teaching—the rest is filled with planning, grading, and admin tasks that often go unseen [1]. When you want to capture how planning time works (or doesn’t) in practice, open-ended questions are best for surfacing challenges, creative workarounds, and insights you never expected.

1. How would you describe your typical planning time during a regular week?

2. What activities take up most of your planning period?

3. Can you share any challenges you face when planning lessons?

4. How effective do you feel your current planning time is for lesson preparation?

5. What would make your planning time more productive or less stressful?

6. Are there school policies or schedules that impact your ability to plan?

7. Describe a time when limited planning time affected your teaching or student outcomes.

8. What tools or resources help you use planning time efficiently?

9. If you could change anything about your planning time, what would it be?

10. How does your planning time compare with what you need to feel effective and energized?

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for a teacher survey about planning time

Single-select multiple-choice questions shine when you want structured data. They're perfect for quantifying opinions or behaviors, or for breaking the ice so teachers feel comfortable before opening up. Sometimes, choosing from a few clear options is just easier than thinking through a full explanation. Start with these to spot trends, then use follow-ups to go deeper with open-ended probes.

Question: How many minutes of dedicated planning time do you receive on a typical school day?

• Less than 15 minutes

• 15–30 minutes

• 31–45 minutes

• 46–60 minutes

• More than 60 minutes

Question: When do you typically do most of your lesson planning?

• During scheduled school hours

• After school hours

• On weekends

• At home in the evenings

• Other

Question: How much of your planning time feels uninterrupted and focused?

• None

• Some

• About half

• Most

• All

When to follow up with "why?" Sometimes a choice is just the start. Always ask “why?” when you want to uncover the reasoning behind a teacher’s response. For example, if a teacher selects “After school hours,” a good follow-up would be, “Why do you find yourself planning after hours?” This opens the door to obstacles, habits, or structural issues that numbers alone can't reveal.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Sometimes the provided options don’t fit everyone’s reality. Including “Other” lets teachers tell you about cases you may not have anticipated. Following up on “Other” choices helps uncover unique situations or innovative solutions you’d otherwise miss.

NPS-style question for teacher surveys about planning time

Net Promoter Score (NPS) isn’t just for marketing—it’s a powerful tool for education, too. In the context of planning time surveys, it helps gauge overall satisfaction quickly: “How likely are you to recommend your school’s approach to planning time to a colleague?” It gives an instant pulse and lets you spot areas ripe for improvement. After all, high burnout levels are a real issue: education leads all other industries in burnout rates [4]. You can use a solution like Specific to create and deploy an NPS-style survey instantly.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-ups are where conversational surveys shine. Instead of leaving feedback vague or ambiguous, automatic follow-up questions help clarify, dig deeper, and fill gaps—right in the flow of the conversation. Learn more about this process on our page about AI follow-up questions.

Specific uses AI to generate smart follow-ups in real time, tailored to the respondent’s previous answer and the specific context. This results in richer, clearer insights and saves loads of time that would otherwise be spent chasing answers via email or another round of surveys. The conversation feels natural and guided, just like talking with a skilled interviewer.

• Teacher: "I mostly do my planning on weekends."
  
  

• AI follow-up: "What makes weekends a better time for you to plan your lessons?"

• Teacher: "I feel rushed during my planning period."

• AI follow-up: "What factors contribute to you feeling rushed during your scheduled planning time?"

How many followups to ask? In general, 2–3 follow-up questions are enough to get to the heart of an issue. But it’s smart to allow respondents to skip to the next main question once you have enough detail. With Specific, you can control how many follow-ups to include, ensuring data quality without making the survey feel tedious.

This makes it a conversational survey—the back-and-forth exchange feels like an actual conversation, not a dry form. Respondents feel heard, not grilled.

AI response analysis, summarization, and categorization—Even if your survey collects a mountain of open-text responses, it’s easy to analyze everything using AI-powered tools. Check out our guide on how to analyze survey responses with AI. AI quickly distills themes and lets you interact with results conversationally, even across hundreds of responses.

These automated AI follow-ups are honestly a new way to do surveys—give them a try with Specific and see just how effortless getting deep, clear answers can be.

How to prompt ChatGPT (or an AI) to generate great questions for a teacher survey about planning time

You can get creative by prompting ChatGPT or another AI assistant to suggest custom survey questions. The simplest approach is:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for a teacher survey about planning time.

But you’ll get even better results by giving detailed context—who you are, the challenges your teachers face, and what insight you’re after. For example:

We're a K-12 school district looking to improve instructional planning for teachers. Our teachers often report feeling rushed and doing prep work at home. Suggest 10 open-ended survey questions to uncover the specific barriers and possible solutions regarding planning time.

Once you have ideas, prompt the AI to sort them for you:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Next, zero in: pick the categories most relevant for your school, and prompt:

Generate 10 questions for categories "Workload barriers" and "Supports/tools".

Repeating this refinement loop lets you tailor your survey to what matters most for your teachers and district.

What is a conversational survey?

A conversational survey feels like a chat with a helpful colleague, rather than ticking boxes or grinding through a list. The big difference? Instead of sticking to a fixed path, the AI adapts and follows up—making it easy to clarify, dig deeper, and truly understand each teacher’s perspective. AI survey generation using a platform like Specific is miles ahead of manual, static survey creation. It’s faster, more responsive, and collects richer data—without requiring research expertise from you.

Why use AI for teacher surveys? Because your time matters, teachers’ time matters, and the insights you need are just too important to leave to chance. An AI survey example—especially one about planning time—shows just how quickly you can launch a feedback loop that feels natural and intelligent. Specific makes this process smooth for both survey creators and for teachers responding. There’s no comparison once you try it.

If you want to see exactly how to set up a survey from scratch, check our step-by-step guide on how to create a teacher survey about planning time using AI.

See this planning time survey example now

Explore how automated AI-powered surveys can uncover actionable insights from teachers about planning time—effortlessly. Get clear, real responses and spark conversation with Specific’s best-in-class experience. Try it for yourself and make your next feedback initiative easier than ever.