This article will guide you on how to create a teacher survey about workload and planning time. With Specific, you can build surveys like this in seconds using AI—just generate your survey and start gathering meaningful insights.
Steps to create a survey for teachers about workload and planning time
If you want to save time, just click this link to generate a survey with Specific.
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
You don’t even need to read further—AI-powered survey generators do all the heavy lifting. They not only compose your survey with expert knowledge on the topic, but also automatically add conversational follow-up questions so you collect rich, nuanced responses from teachers.
If you want to build a semantic survey from scratch, the Specific AI survey builder helps you with that too.
Why teacher workload and planning time surveys matter
Let’s be blunt: If you’re not regularly checking in with teachers about their workload and planning time, you’re missing out on real opportunities to support their wellbeing and effectiveness. These surveys are vital for a healthy work environment and to guide smarter resource allocation.
Teachers face serious challenges, with 84% reporting insufficient time during the workday for grading, planning, or paperwork, and 77% say their job is stressful. Over 68% of teachers feel overwhelmed by their workload. [2]
Without feedback, leadership flies blind—missed warning signs, lost retention opportunities, and potential burnout remain invisible until it’s too late. The importance of a teacher recognition survey or feedback on workload isn’t just about numbers—it’s about acting before high stress and imbalance drive great educators away.
Remember: 54% find it tough to balance work and personal life, while 46% work over 50 hours a week. [2][3]
The benefits of teacher feedback are huge: From reducing attrition to honing schedules and boosting satisfaction, feedback surveys are a must-have for any school leader or admin team prioritizing staff wellbeing.
What makes a good survey on workload and planning time?
Great teacher surveys avoid complex language and bias, and focus on clarity above all. To encourage honest, helpful responses, keep your tone conversational and welcoming to create a trusted space for sharing both positive and candid feedback.
Bad Practices | Good Practices |
|---|---|
Leading or biased wording | Unbiased, open tone |
Long, confusing questions | Clear, short questions |
No open-ended follow-ups | Includes space for context and detail |
The best metric? The quantity and quality of responses. If both are high—meaning teachers actually fill it out and give thoughtful, specific feedback—your survey did its job. The quality of conversational surveys paired with a friendly, unbiased format makes all the difference.
Question types with examples for teacher survey about workload and planning time
There are different ways to ask—and it’s not just multiple choice. Here’s how different question types serve your survey’s goals.
Open-ended questions uncover insights you didn’t anticipate. They’re perfect for understanding feelings or stories and work best as introductory or follow-up prompts. Examples:
What is your biggest challenge when organizing lesson planning?
Can you describe any strategies you use to manage workload stress?
Single-select multiple-choice questions are ideal for when you need structured data or to quantify trends across departments or grade levels. Example:
How much planning time do you typically have each day?
Less than 30 minutes
30-50 minutes
More than 50 minutes
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question offers a simple, universal measure of how likely teachers are to recommend their school’s support systems to peers. This allows benchmarking across time and institutions, and instantly segments respondents by how satisfied they are. If you want to instantly generate an NPS survey around workload and planning time, use this AI survey generator. Example:
On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend your school’s workload support to another teacher?
Followup questions to uncover "the why" are essential for clarifying and digging deeper when an answer is vague or lists multiple topics. The AI can step in automatically with the right prompt, for example:
What factors contribute to you feeling that your planning time is insufficient?
For more inspiration and a full breakdown, check this article with the best questions for a teacher survey on workload and planning time.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys are designed to feel like a real discussion, not an interrogation. Each question flows naturally, and the survey asks follow-ups based on each response—just like a skilled human interviewer. This keeps teachers more engaged, increases completion rates, and leads to higher-quality feedback.
AI-powered survey generation is a leap over manual forms. Instead of building static surveys by hand, an AI survey generator builds context-aware questions, adapts them for clarity, and includes smart branching—all within seconds. You don’t have to think about every rule or logic path yourself. Here’s a simple comparison:
Manual Surveys | AI-generated Surveys |
|---|---|
Each question written one by one | Survey built from a prompt in seconds |
No followups or hand-coded followups | Automatic, context-aware followups |
Hard to update or localize | Edit by chatting with AI (see AI survey editor) |
Static, impersonal | Feels like a real chat with a research expert |
Why use AI for teacher surveys? The answer is simple: AI creates a conversational, adaptive experience at scale. An AI survey example is ready in moments, and you get better, more detailed feedback with little effort. Specific is built for this—our conversational surveys and dynamic followups set the standard for a top-tier survey experience, both for creators and respondents.
If you’re curious how to build your own, here’s a detailed guide for survey creation and analysis, packed with real-world tips.
The power of follow-up questions
If you care about teacher workload survey insights, follow-up questions are a gamechanger. Conversational survey platforms like Specific use AI to automatically ask deeper, smarter follow-ups after each response—just like a live researcher. This transforms feedback collection:
It saves hours (no back-and-forth via email later).
The conversation flows more naturally for teachers, so they feel heard and supported.
Here’s how it can look when you don’t ask smart followups:
Teacher: “I don’t have enough time to plan.”
AI follow-up: “Can you tell me more about which tasks take up most of your planning time?”
This back-and-forth gathers fuller context. Miss it, and you’ll often get shallow, unclear responses that are tough to analyze or act on. Learn more about this with automatic follow-up question features.
How many followups to ask? We recommend 2–3 for each question, unless an answer is already clear; in Specific you can set a rule to skip followups once you have what you need. This saves time and keeps surveys concise.
This makes it a conversational survey: When followups are natural and dynamic, the survey feels like a real conversation rather than an interrogation.
Analyze responses with AI: AI can easily summarize and organize even pages of text feedback or followup responses. See AI survey response analysis for teachers surveys for tips on leveraging AI for a fast, thorough readout of your survey results.
Automated follow-ups are new—try generating a teacher survey with Specific and experience the difference.
See this workload and planning time survey example now
Try a conversational, AI-generated teacher survey—get better insights and save hours. Create your own survey and watch your response rates and answer quality soar.