Here are some of the best questions for a teacher survey about workload, plus practical tips for crafting insightful teacher surveys. If you want to build your own survey quickly, you can use Specific to generate a teacher workload survey in seconds.
The best open-ended questions for teacher workload surveys
Open-ended questions are invaluable for teacher surveys about workload because they let teachers share details in their own words, uncovering nuances you won’t see in a checklist. They work best when you want to go beyond simple metrics and understand experiences, bottlenecks, or root causes. Especially with today’s high stress levels—where 84% of teachers report lacking enough time to complete core tasks, and 68% often feel overwhelmed [1]—open questions help break through the noise and give teachers space to voice what truly matters.
Can you describe the biggest challenges you face in managing your workload during the school week?
What tasks take up the majority of your non-teaching time?
How does your current workload impact your ability to support students effectively?
What types of support or resources would make your workload more manageable?
Can you share an example of a particularly stressful period and what contributed to it?
What practices or processes would you change to improve workload and well-being?
How does administrative work affect your teaching preparation time?
Are there specific tasks you feel could be reduced or streamlined? Which ones?
What feedback do you have for leadership regarding teacher workload?
In your view, what’s the most positive aspect of your current workload, if any?
The best single-select multiple-choice questions for teacher workload
Single-select multiple-choice questions help when you need to quantify trends in teacher workload or kickoff conversation—sometimes it’s easier for teachers to click an option before opening up. With teacher burnout rates at 65%, driven by high weekly working hours averaging 52.4–58.2 hours [2][3], short, focused questions get you actionable data fast.
Here are three well-structured examples:
Question: Which task consumes most of your weekly work hours?
Grading student work
Lesson planning
Administrative duties
Meetings and collaboration
Other
Question: On average, how often do you feel overwhelmed by your workload?
Daily
Several times a week
Occasionally
Rarely
Question: What level of support do you receive from school leadership regarding workload management?
Excellent
Good
Fair
Poor
When to followup with "why?" After respondents make a choice, asking “Why?” is a powerful way to deepen your insight and reveal the reasoning behind their answers. For example, if a teacher selects “Administrative duties” as their primary drain, follow up with, “Why do administrative duties take so much of your time? What makes them challenging?” This opens the door for rich qualitative details.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? Including “Other” is essential when you want to avoid bias and capture unexpected answers. Letting teachers write in their own response through a followup helps you uncover issues you hadn’t considered, providing you a fuller picture of workload pain points.
NPS for teacher surveys about workload
Net Promoter Score (NPS) isn’t just for customers—it’s increasingly used to gauge how likely teachers are to recommend their school as a supportive workplace. In the context of workload, a NPS question gives a quick read on teacher sentiment and, combined with follow-ups, reveals what drives advocacy or burnout. Consider using an NPS survey for teachers about workload to benchmark and track changes over time.
The power of follow-up questions
If you’re serious about teacher surveys, don’t just stop at surface-level answers. The real magic happens with automated followup questions. We’ve built an entire feature for automatic AI follow-up questions because, time and time again, followups turn vague answers into stories and actionable findings.
Specific’s AI engine asks highly relevant follow-ups, tailored to the teacher’s previous responses. It does this instantly, just like a skilled interviewer would, but without the manual effort. That means you get a natural conversation, richer context, and far less back-and-forth over email.
Teacher: “I’m overwhelmed with grading.”
AI follow-up: “What about grading is most time-consuming for you? Is it the quantity, the format, or something else?”
How many followups to ask? Two or three followups are usually enough to clarify the teacher’s perspective without feeling repetitive. If you already have the needed information, enable the “skip to next question” setting—Specific lets you tailor this for each survey.
This makes it a conversational survey. Instead of a generic form, teachers experience a real dialogue, which increases engagement and response depth.
AI analysis of open-ended answers is now effortless. Even with lots of free-form text, tools like AI survey response analysis and our approach to qualitative surveys let you summarize, theme, and chat about responses for deep insight.
Automated followups are something most teams haven’t tried yet—go ahead and experience a teacher workload survey with them and see how much you can uncover.
Crafting great prompts for ChatGPT or AI survey generators
If you want to experiment with your own AI survey design, start with a basic prompt and build up context. For example, try:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for teacher survey about workload.
You’ll get better, more tailored results if you give the AI some background:
We are designing a teacher workload survey for a large urban district. Teachers report high stress and long hours. Please suggest 10 open-ended questions to better understand the causes and possible improvements.
After generating a big list, organize your questions:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Next, focus your deep dive by prompting:
Generate 10 questions for categories “Time management” and “Support/resources”.
What is a conversational survey, and why does it matter?
Simply put, a conversational survey uses AI to make each interaction feel like a real, responsive chat. Instead of rigid forms, teachers answer followups in real-time, with the AI probing for clarification, details, or examples—just like in an interview, but totally automated. Compared to old-school survey tools, this approach is more human, more engaging, and elicits richer data you can trust. Here’s how they compare:
Manual Survey | AI-Generated Survey |
|---|---|
Static, pre-set questions | Adaptive, context-aware questions with smart follow-ups |
One-way, often feels impersonal | Feels like a natural chat—high engagement |
Limited follow-ups (manual only) | Automated, on-the-fly follow-ups for clarity |
Manual data analysis | Instant AI-powered analysis & insights |
Why use AI for teacher surveys? With teacher workload and stress at critical levels, AI survey generators like Specific empower you to get honest feedback—fast. Building a teacher workload survey with AI saves huge amounts of time and mental effort while improving quality, clarity, and inclusion for every respondent. AI survey examples consistently show better response rates and richer feedback compared to manual surveys.
Specific prides itself on top-tier user experience for conversational surveys, making both survey creation and teacher participation effortless and rewarding.
See this workload survey example now
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