From leadership research to district action: Facilitators of and Barriers to Teachers’ Engagement With Consumer Technologies for Stress Management: Qualitative Study

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract Background Consumer technology is increasingly being adopted to support personal stress management, including by teachers. Multidisciplinary research has contributed some knowledge of design and features that can help detect and manage workplace stress. However, there is less understanding of what facilitates engagement with ubiquitous “off the shelf” technologies, particularly in a specific occupational setting. An understanding of features that facilitate or inhibit technology use, and the influences of contexts on the manner of interaction, could improve teachers’ stress-management opportunities. Objective The aim of the study was to investigate the interaction features that facilitated or inhibited engagement with 4 consumer technologies chosen by teachers for stress management, as well as the influence of the educational contexts on their engagement. We also examined how use of well-being technology could be better supported in the school. Methods The choice of consumer technologies was categorized in a taxonomy for English secondary school teachers according to stress-management strategies and digital features. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we adapted the study so that working from home in the summer could be contrasted with being back in school. Thus, a longitudinal study intended for 6 weeks in the summer term (in 2020) was extended into the autumn term, lasting up to 27 weeks. Teachers chose to use either a Withings smartwatch or Wysa, Daylio, or Teacher Tapp apps. Two semistructured interviews and web-based surveys were conducted with 8 teachers in England in the summer term, and 6 (75%) of them took part in a third interview in the autumn term. Interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis informed by interpretive phenomenological analysis. Results Technology elements and characteristics such as passive data collation, brevity of interaction, discreet appearance, reminders, and data visualization were described by teachers as facilitators. Lack of instructions and information on features, connectivity, extended interaction requirements, and nondifferentiation of activity and exercise data were described as barriers. Mesocontextual barriers to engagement were also reported, particularly when teachers were back on school premises, including temporal constraints, social stigma, and lack of private space to de-stress. Teachers had ideas for feature improvements and how educational leadership normalizing teachers’ stress management with consumer technologies could benefit the school culture. Conclusions Having preselected their stress-management strategies, teachers were able to harness design features to support themselves over an extended period. There could be an important role for digital interventions as part of teachers’ stress management, which the school leadership would need to leverage to maximize their potential. The findings add to the holistic understanding of situated self-care and should inform developers’ considerations for occupational digital stress support. Keywords: teachers, stress, workplace, self-management, digital health, technology, qualitative, context, high schools, wearables, apps, human-computer interaction, HCI, personal informatics

Study methods

A longitudinal study was planned that used semistructured interviews, as well as open and closed-question surveys. Before the first interview, workshops were conducted to help teachers make an informed choice of consumer technology based on understanding their personal stress management strategy and technology preferences. Consumer technologies were framed as digital companions when presented to teachers in workshops. This framing drew on the framing of apps as “life companions” by Klasnja and Pratt [103], acknowledging users’ autonomy [104], emphasizing the mediating and collaborative role of the technology [105], and avoiding any commercial connotations of simply being a consumer Referred to by name or simply as technologies in this paper, those chosen by teachers for this study were the Withings Steel HR smartwatch (that uses PPG to detect heart rate changes); Wysa (Wysa Ltd), an artificial intelligence chatbot based on CBT techniques; Daylio, a mood diary and activity tracking app; and Teacher Tapp, a daily teachers survey with an educational blog. Support was given to the teachers in acquiring their choice of technology from those populating a rigorously compiled taxonomy based on suitability, availability, evaluation, security, validity, and cost; the design of which is described elsewhere [106]. Reasons for teachers’ choices are described in detail in a companion paper on their experiences but include apparent ease of use, to inform stress correlations; enable passive collation of data; and give insight into sleeping patterns [107].

Limitations

Contrasting with the facilitating features of design, barriers were first evident from descriptions of the designers’ apparent assumptions that consumer technologies use could be entirely intuitive. This created some friction in their use. The usefulness of the technology was hindered by a lack of information, with some participants believing that features were not available when they were and vice versa. Barriers also included a lack of automatic data differentiation and connectivity limitations. Once again, these subthemes are interconnected.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Map one recurring source of staff workload with voluntary staff input. Agree one reversible schedule, support or task-allocation change and name its owner. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Compare workload hours, a consistent voluntary wellbeing measure, absence and retention intentions with the pre-pilot baseline. Report response rates and avoid causal claims from an uncontrolled comparison. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Julia B Manning; Ann Blandford; Julian Edbrooke-Childs. Facilitators of and Barriers to Teachers’ Engagement With Consumer Technologies for Stress Management: Qualitative Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research (2024-10-22). https://doi.org/10.2196/50457

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.