There is the work of teaching, and then there is all the work required to make teaching possible.
That distinction was at the center of my recent conversation with Sherri Wilson, Ed.D., principal of William Dandy Middle School in Broward County Public Schools and former Director of Innovative Learning. Wilson has spent 26 years in education, moving between teaching, coaching, school leadership and district-level innovation. That gives her an unusual view of what happens between a decision made upstream and the work required to make that decision function in a classroom.
Editor’s note: Dr. Wilson spoke with Learning Counsel from her own experience as an educational practitioner and leader. Her comments and perspectives in this conversation should not be interpreted as statements on behalf of Broward County Public Schools or the District as a whole.
And increasingly, that space between the decision and the classroom is where an enormous amount of human labor is hiding.
Wilson knows this from both sides. In her former district role, she managed core state-mandated instructional-materials adoptions that, she said, could range from $25 million to $42 million, depending on the content area and accompanying materials. Yet an abundance of materials does not necessarily translate into an easier instructional experience.
“There’s far more materials than you have the time to explore as a teacher,” Wilson said, adding that educators can experience “a lot of digital fatigue” and that “having things streamlined for effectiveness is definitely key.”
That should catch the attention of anyone involved in procurement or instructional-materials adoption.
What Are We Actually Buying?
The traditional curriculum question has been about the quality of the instructional material: Is it rigorous? Does it align? Does it provide what teachers and students need?
Those questions remain important. But the conversation with Wilson surfaced another question that deserves equal scrutiny:
What work does the purchase leave behind?
During our discussion, I described teachers navigating curriculum, supplemental resources, digital systems, adaptations, interventions, lesson assembly and the movement of information between all of them.
“The thing between the things, the workload, is majestic,” I said.
That is the invisible part.
A district can purchase excellent instructional materials and still leave teachers responsible for making all the pieces operational. Teachers may still have to assemble, alter, adapt and reorganize what has been purchased for the actual humans sitting in front of them.
AI makes that distinction more consequential because technology can now potentially assume some work that previously had no alternative but to land on educators.
As I put it during the conversation, the opportunity is not merely another chatbot. It is AI embedded into the instructional environment and pointed at real work: versioning lessons for adaptations, generating practice, assisting with feedback, identifying misconception groups, and helping teachers adjust instructional sequences when circumstances change.
Otherwise, something curious happens. We buy more technology while continuing to spend human capacity connecting and operating it.
When the Work Reaches the Learner
The most revealing part of our conversation came when Wilson described what is happening inside her own school.
Her team has created what she calls an “Academic ER.”
“We’re triaging our students academically,” Wilson explained. “We have decentralized the master schedule for this group of students.”
Using student data, the school identifies a particular group of learners and modifies the normal schedule to provide more targeted instruction. Wilson described strategically working with students where they have deficiencies in reading, mathematics and science, using different instructional configurations that include direct instruction, Socratic seminar, independent practice and group work.
Her larger idea goes further.
“I really feel that we need to decentralize how we master schedule,” Wilson said, “because the students actually lead the learning by their data, by where they are growing, where they have deficiency.”
That is where the “ER” metaphor becomes instructive.
An emergency room is where extraordinary resources are mobilized because the ordinary flow is no longer sufficient. Wilson and her team are doing something inventive and intensely human to respond to learners.
But look upstream from that response and an important structural question emerges:
How much exceptional human effort are schools using to compensate for work the system itself could have prevented, automated or better organized?
In fact, Wilson herself connected her academic ER back to our central subject. When I observed, “That’s a lot of work, and we’re talking about the work,” she responded:
“And that is the work around the work.”
Leadership Can't Simply Hand the Work Downstream
Wilson's other example makes the problem even clearer.
She described implementing a school-wide Claim, Evidence and Reasoning strategy and realizing that simply introducing it to teachers would not produce meaningful implementation.
“This is not going to scale,” she recalled. “We can’t just have a conversation and expect to see it. We need to model and break every barrier for this to land at scale the way we need it to.”
So Wilson took what she called the “lion’s share” of the work herself. With assistance from Claude and ChatGPT, she developed materials, posters, rubrics and a comprehensive implementation kit. She collaborated with her team, showed exemplars, vetted the approach, took it through the curriculum council and then trained staff in manageable pieces.
The development process took roughly six weeks.
And there is a particularly important reason why she did it.
It was six weeks of planning, Wilson said, “that I didn’t want the teachers to do or the coaches.”
She did not simply issue the initiative and transfer its implementation burden downstream.
She tried to remove that burden.
According to Wilson, the implementation “landed so well” precisely “because all barriers were removed.”
That's worth sitting with.
Because extraordinary principals can do this.
Extraordinary teachers do it.
Coaches do it.
Curriculum leaders do it.
They supply what Wilson calls the “sweat equity.” But if the functioning of the system depends upon extraordinary people continually supplying extraordinary amounts of compensating labor, we haven't solved the structural problem.
We have hidden it.
Procurement Has to See the Invisible Work
And this is where our conversation came directly back to procurement and instructional-materials adoption.
Wilson described what she sees nationally as a “definite disconnect between boots on the ground and decision makers.”
“If you are not in this role,” she said, “you don’t understand what it takes to fill in those gaps between the policy making and the day to day.”
That may be one of the most important considerations for the next generation of curriculum procurement.
In the conversation, I pushed the issue directly toward Florida, where major instructional-materials adoptions are underway.
My concern is straightforward: we can become extremely sophisticated about evaluating the instructional content while remaining remarkably unsophisticated about evaluating the work required to operationalize it.
We can evaluate the curriculum itself and completely miss the workload produced around it.
We can buy comprehensive resources without asking how much assembly they require.
We can buy digital capability without calculating the human workflow necessary to operate it.
We can celebrate personalization while quietly handing the labor of creating all that personalization to teachers.
“There’s a missing not looking at the work you’re making people do,” I said during the discussion. “You’re buying something because you used to buy textbooks the same way you used to buy textbooks. You’re not looking at what AI can really do now.”
And ultimately, it is not merely an employee workload issue.
“The children, the students, are the ones that suffer from something that’s purchased that isn’t helping take the load off,” I said.
That's the procurement question I think Florida, and every district contemplating its next major adoption, needs to put on the table:
After we buy this, what work will humans still have to do to make it work?
Not just: Is it standards-aligned?
Not just: Is the pedagogy sound?
Not just: Does it contain all the required materials?
But: What does a teacher have to assemble? What must be adapted manually? What happens when students need different versions of instruction? What happens when assessment identifies three different misconception groups? What happens when the pacing changes?
And, increasingly:
What can the instructional system now do for the teacher rather than requiring the teacher to do for the system?
I put it plainly in the conversation:
“What we need is true differentiated instruction, but not to kill the teacher doing it.”
Human Capacity Is Now Part of the Purchase
This is bigger than efficiency.
Wilson said that “the human intelligence and the sweat equity of the teachers has to be valued.”
That gives us a different way of thinking about both technology and procurement.
The purpose of AI should not be to squeeze even more production out of already overloaded educators. It should be able to absorb appropriate work, reduce unnecessary assembly and allow more human capacity to move back toward the things only humans can do especially well.
Wilson warned against leaders becoming disconnected from that reality and making “decisions that are counterproductive to the practitioner that’s boots on the ground every day.”
That is precisely why procurement needs to change.
The next generation of instructional-materials review cannot look only at what a product contains. It also needs to examine what using that product requires people to do.
Because when we fail to see the invisible work upstream, the work doesn't disappear.
It travels downstream.
Eventually it shows up in teacher capacity. It shows up in inconsistent implementation. It shows up in principals and coaches using extraordinary amounts of their own time to bridge gaps. And ultimately, it can show up in the experience of learners, where schools find themselves creating increasingly intensive responses to get students where they need to go.
The academic ER is a powerful example of educators responding creatively when students need something different.
The bigger challenge is to build structures, procure instructional systems and employ technology that prevent so much of the work from becoming an emergency in the first place.
Removing the work around the work begins by seeing it before we buy it.
