Camelot Educator Earns Doctorate – Finds School’s Culture is Critical to Motivating Students

Julia Guajardo Barrow is VP of Operations with Camelot Education

(Houston, Texas – February 11, 2015)

When Camelot Education’s VP of Operations, Julia Guajardo Barrow, began pursuing her doctorate degree in Professional Leadership from the University of Houston two years ago, she set out to measure what impact a school’s positive-normative culture has on student achievement. And she concluded it absolutely does.

“What I wanted to know was – how do we impact kids to where we improve behaviors, improve attitudes, and improve achievement,” said Guajardo Barrow. “Basically the outcome was that the normative culture and positive peer culture are critical in helping us to do that.”

The study was conducted at a large, urban Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) operated by Camelot Education, which serves students who have gotten into trouble at their middle or high school. They come to the DAEP to get themselves back on track to advance and ultimately return to their sending school. Guajardo Barrow found that there is a statistically significant difference in attitudes toward teachers before and after the student spends some time at the DAEP.

“That’s important because studies and research tell you that the student-teacher relationship is really critical, and my study concluded that we are good at doing that. We are able to connect the kids to their teachers and other adults around them, and that connection results in the kids re-engaging with school. And when you’re connecting kids back to school that means they’re focusing and trying to do their work better. So when they do that they see they can get passing grades and that their work gets posted on the wall. That develops their self-efficacy, meaning that that they become more confident in their abilities and realize that if they only focus and try, then they can succeed. That is one of the reasons how we end up with improved attitudes, behaviors, and achievement,” she says.

Guajardo Barrow earned all three of her degrees, bachelor’s, master’s and now doctorate at the University of Houston. She spent 10 years as a teacher and has been in school leadership positions for nearly the past 20 years. She traces her drive back to her childhood as a first generation US citizen.

“I’m the oldest in the family so I always wanted to be a little bit of a trailblazer in setting the pathway for everybody behind me and so as I was growing up my dad and mom used to drive by this big university and every time they drove by they would say, ‘that’s where you’re going to school’ and everything was about going to that school,” Guajardo Barrow says. “So in my mind there was never a doubt that I was going to go, and now I have gone there three times. (Her two younger siblings also graduated from the University of Houston.)

The students who go to the DAEP are often disconnected from school. They appear to be apathetic, their attendance drops, and in some cases they drop out. Even so, one important outcome of her study was that, regardless of their behaviors, students want to learn and obtaining an education is important to them. Guajardo Barrow says the school environment is a huge part of providing conditions for learning and turning these students around.

“Alternative education is a means to address those children that have a hard time and are not necessarily in a setting that supports them in a way they need to be supported. This positive normative setting is a means to provide students with a culture that will help them to flourish, that will reconnect them, that will bring them back to the academic table so that when they do go back to their home school they have a better chance of being successful. It gives them hope.”

Guajardo Barrow was asked, if her findings show that a school’s culture plays such a big role in alternative education, wouldn’t the same hold true for mainstream schools?

“I would not want to presume what would work in the traditional setting,” she says, but my research has shown that attention to culture does impact kids in an alternative education environment and it’s something that would be worthwhile exploring in a traditional setting as well.”