Why Teachers Don’t Need More Resources, They Need More Time

Teachers have never had access to more educational resources. Search Google for a lesson on multiplying fractions and you’ll find thousands of options. Open social media and you’ll find activities, classroom hacks, templates, games, anchor charts, and teaching strategies. Visit an educational marketplace and you’ll find resources for virtually every standard imaginable.

There has never been more content available to teachers, so why doesn’t teaching feel easier?

Mostly because the problem was never simply a lack of resources. The problem is time.

Having more resources available doesn’t necessarily solve that problem. Finding, evaluating, modifying, and implementing the right resource takes time, too. Research on “choice overload” has found that choosing can become more difficult when the options are complex, the decision itself is difficult, or we’re uncertain about which option best meets our needs. A teacher tomorrow’s lesson can easily face all three at once.

More Educational Resources Can Mean More Decisions

Imagine it’s Tuesday afternoon and tomorrow you’re teaching a concept your students struggled with today. You need something different, something scaffolded, appropriate for your students, and aligned to standards, so you start searching.

You find a worksheet and think, maybe this one will work. Then another one looks better. You find a free activity someone shared online, a lesson from your district curriculum, and something another teacher recommended. Twenty minutes later, you haven’t really solved the problem. Instead, you’ve unintentionally created another one.

Now you have to decide which resource is actually appropriate for your students. Is it rigorous enough? Are the directions clear? Does it need to be modified? Does it provide enough practice? How long will it take? What happens when some students finish early? What are you going to do with the students who still don’t understand?

The abundance of educational resources hasn’t eliminated the teacher’s workload. It has simply moved some of that workload from creating to searching, evaluating, modifying, and deciding. Every one of those decisions costs something: time.

The Most Expensive Resource in Education Is the Teacher’s Time

“Planning time” sounds deceptively simple. Unfortunately, a teacher doesn’t just sit down, choose tomorrow’s lesson, and go home. Planning can mean reviewing standards, interpreting curriculum, finding examples, creating slides, writing assessments, modifying materials, preparing interventions, responding to student data, communicating with families, grading yesterday’s work, and preparing for tomorrow.

That’s the part of teaching people outside the classroom don’t always see. The work doesn’t necessarily end when students leave. Often, that’s when another kind of work begins.

In 2024, RAND surveyed nearly 1,500 U.S. public K – 12 teachers and found that 60% reported burnout and 59% reported frequent job-related stress. Teachers reported frequent job-related stress at roughly twice the rate of comparable working adults.

Those hours matter. An hour spent searching for tomorrow’s activity can’t also be spent analyzing why a student didn’t understand today’s lesson. An hour spent creating an assessment from scratch can’t be spent developing an intervention for a student who needs additional help. An hour spent formatting a worksheet at 8:00 p.m. can’t also be spent exercising, reading, resting, eating dinner with family, or simply being something other than a teacher for a while.

It isn’t because teachers should care less about their work. Quite the opposite. It’s because they care so much about doing the work well and about the outcomes of their students.

Better Educational Resources Should Remove Work, Not Add to It

This has changed the way we think about what an educational resource should actually do. A good resource shouldn’t simply provide more content. It should remove friction.

It should help answer some of the questions a teacher would otherwise have to solve alone. What am I teaching? How should I approach it? Where are students likely to struggle? How will they practice? How will I know whether they understand? What can I do when they don’t?

The closer a resource gets to answering those questions well, the more valuable it becomes. Not because it contains more pages, but because it requires fewer unnecessary decisions from the teacher using it.

That’s an important distinction for us.

The value of an educational resource shouldn’t be measured only by how much content it contains. It should also be measured by how much unnecessary work it removes while still allowing the educator to teach.

What Does “Beyond the Worksheet” Mean?

When Beyond the Worksheet began, the name represented a belief that math instruction should be more than pages of repetitive problems. We still believe that, but today the name means something more to us. Going beyond the worksheet also means thinking beyond the product.

As educators ourselves, we’re beginning to look at everything we create through a simple question:

How much unnecessary work can we remove from a teacher’s day without compromising the quality of instruction?

Sometimes the answer might be a worksheet. Sometimes it’s an intervention lesson, an assessment, or a complete math curriculum. Sometimes it may simply be an idea that saves someone twenty minutes tomorrow morning.

We’re not interested in creating more content simply because we can. There is already plenty of content in the world.

The format isn’t the mission. The time returned to the educator is.

How Better Teacher Resources Can Give Educators Their Evenings Back

When we say we want to give educators their evenings back, we aren’t suggesting that teaching should require less thought or that good instruction can be reduced to opening a resource and pressing “print.” Quite the opposite.

We believe a teacher’s limited time should be spent on the things only they can do well: teaching, listening, questioning, encouraging, observing, adapting, building relationships, and recognizing when a student needs something different. It’s helping a student experience that moment when something that seemed impossible finally makes sense.

Those are extraordinarily valuable uses of a teacher’s time. Searching through fifteen versions of the same worksheet at 9:00 p.m. isn’t.

So, “giving teachers their evenings back” is as much a commitment we’re making to ourselves as it is a promise we’re making to educators. Every resource we create, article we publish, tool we develop, and decision we make about the future of Beyond the Worksheet should eventually have to answer the same question:

Does this help a teacher spend less time preparing to teach and more time doing the things that matter?

Teachers don’t need more things. They need better tools, fewer unnecessary decisions, and resources they can trust.

More than anything else, they need their time back.