Removing the Work Around the Work

What happens when the invisible work built into the structure of schooling becomes so great that its consequences eventually show up in learners? In this episode of The Learning Counsel Report, LeiLani Cauthen talks with Sherri Wilson, Ed.D., principal of William Dandy Middle School in Broward County Public Schools, whose career has moved between classroom, school and district leadership, including service as Director of Innovative Learning. That macro-to-micro perspective gives Sherri Wilson an unusually clear view of the distance between what institutions decide and what educators must actually do to make those decisions work.

The conversation begins with the mounting “work around the work”: the materials, digital systems, adaptations, instructional assembly and implementation labor surrounding teaching itself. Sherri Wilson describes digital fatigue, the need to streamline resources for effectiveness and a persistent gap between policy and daily practice. She also makes the case that leaders cannot merely hand teachers another strategy and expect it to scale. Leaders have to remove the barriers that keep the intended work from actually happening.

Then the conversation reaches the consequence. Sherri Wilson describes what her school calls an “academic ER”, an intensive response in which student data drives modified scheduling and more targeted instructional groupings. She argues more broadly for decentralizing the traditional master schedule so resources and practitioners can move more responsively to learner needs.

The larger question is uncomfortable: Are schools continually asking exceptional people to compensate for structures that create too much work in the first place, perhaps by buying curriculum that doesn’t try to reduce workload? AI creates an opportunity to rethink that equation, not merely by helping educators do more, but by removing unnecessary work and giving more human capacity back to the actual work of teaching and learning.