UC Berkeley

Schools exist in a perpetual state of transformation and change. They modify and adjust their practices, systems and structures to meet the demands required of them and to impact the educational outcomes of students. The resulting demand on teachers' time, energy, skill, and knowledge is unmatched, contributing to what is referenced in the school reform literature as overloading. Overloaded schools operate beyond their existing capacity and fail to produce improved student outcomes. The School Capacity and Overload Review (SCORE) is a design dissertation aiming to capture the conditions of overload that may exist within schools.

The School Capacity and Overload Review (SCORE) was developed to assist school leaders in identifying the presence of overload in their schools, and importantly, to ascertain if fundamental aspects of human capital --teachers' time, personal energy, or ability to acquire and capitalize on new knowledge and skills --have been compromised.The findings of the SCORE may help uncover school improvement overload, or prevent it from happening in the future. This design study has an action research orientation with two primary research elements: assessment of the design impact and investigation of the design process.