If you are leading a school, faculty or system team, you are already living with the consequences of digitalisation. Every new platform, reporting requirement and communication channel is experienced by teachers as extra work, on top of planning, teaching and student support. This section is written for people who make decisions about tools, policies and professional learning, and who want a clearer view of how those decisions play out in teachers’ digital days.
In my doctoral research I describe this as the Digitally Mediated Work of Teachers (DMWT). The study follows teachers in a Victorian secondary school as they move through welfare and behaviour systems, learning platforms, assessment dashboards, email, messaging tools and, more recently, AI systems. It also traces the informal staffroom work that keeps those systems running, and the organisational and industrial settings that make digital practice either sustainable or fragile.
What you will find here
The posts collected under this heading focus on leadership questions. They look at:
• how policies, timetables, meeting loads and duty structures shape the time and attention available for digital work
• how platform choices and data requirements accumulate into workload for classroom staff
• how informal support networks operate as a shadow professional learning system, and what happens when they are overstretched
• how generative AI is being introduced and managed in schools that are already saturated with digital systems
Many of the pieces include concrete vignettes from school life, followed by implications for leadership practice. Others are more conceptual, framing digital work as labour rather than simply as “using technology well”.
Why this might be useful for you
For leaders, this lens can help shift questions away from “Why are some teachers not using the tools properly” towards “What have we designed here, and who is carrying the load”.
You can use the material here to:
• map the digital tasks currently expected of teachers across DMWT domains
• identify duplication, legacy systems and undocumented expectations
• review how much informal troubleshooting and coaching is being done, and by whom
• stress test proposed changes, for example a new platform or AI tool, against the existing digital workload
Some posts translate directly into checklists, reflection prompts or meeting questions that can be taken into leadership teams, staff consultative forums or school improvement planning.
How this connects to the rest of the site
This section looks at your role across all three pillars:
• Digitally Mediated Work of Teachers describes the digital tasks staff are actually doing.
• Informal exchange of digital practices shows how teachers help one another to keep those tasks manageable, often in ways leadership does not see.
• How schools shape digital practice focuses on the structures you influence, such as timetables, policies, enterprise agreements, platform decisions and PD design.
Reading across these pillars makes it easier to see where a change in structure or expectation might relieve pressure, and where it might quietly add to it.
Where to start
If you are new here, you might begin with:
• What is Digitally Mediated Work in a School
• How School Policies Shape Teachers’ Digital Days
• Timetables, Yard Duty and Digital Workload
• A Checklist for Leaders Before Introducing a New Digital Tool
From there you can move to pieces on informal peer support and on how AI is entering already busy digital workplaces.
If you are interested in using this work in school reviews, strategy development or professional learning, you are welcome to get in touch through the contact page.
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Dominic Brash 