Lessons from The Fleet : improving organizational leadership based on Prairie Lakes Church practices through fictional narrative

Prairie Lakes Church (PLC) is a religious institution with a rich history within the Cedar Valley. The church’s origins date back to 1854, only one year after Cedar Falls was incorporated. Throughout the years there have been many changes to the organization, including their name, location, and the population served. Many of the more radical changes have occurred during the last decade. In 2006, Prairie Lakes Church had a single location with roughly twenty staff and a congregation of around 1,000 individuals. Since then, the church’s presence has expanded to five other communities across Iowa. Over sixty people are now employed, and the total number of attendees on any given Sunday is 2,500 to 3,000 people (C. Uhrmacher, personal communication, October 13, 2016). What has made PLC succeed where so many other nonprofit organizations have not? The answer may lie with the leadership styles of the upper management. The purpose of this thesis was to explore the leadership practices used within a successful religious institution. The goal was to compare Prairie Lakes Church’s leadership model to widely held theories in the field of nonprofit management. One piece of the project was research-based, involving an interview process with each of the head pastors of the organization. The second product was creative-based: a short, fictional work demonstrating the leadership style in narrative form. The results will be utilized by Prairie Lakes Church as orientation for new hires and as inspiration for other nonprofit and for-profit organizations

Understanding and Enacting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Through Multicultural Children\u27s Literature: A Case Study of Preservice Teachers in Georgia

This study explored how preservice teachers understand culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and used multicultural children’s literature (MCL) as a way of enacting CSP in their field placement experiences. This qualitative study utilized the theoretical framework of culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) and a single case study design (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018) to explore five preservice teachers’ understanding and perceptions of CSP and its enactment in the classroom through MCL during their final student teaching semester in their hometowns. Data collected through lesson plans, literature lists, video recordings, and semi-structured interviews and then inductively coded through holistic coding and subcoding (Creswell & Poth, 2018; Saldaña, 2016). After pattern coding the subcodes and analyzing the data, the themes surrounding CSP showed that students believed CSP related to sociocultural and academic knowledge of students and the use of location and real life examples within the classroom. When analyzing MCL use as enactment of CSP, the themes of selecting MCL by content, academic abilities and student interests emerged. These findings all showed that participants needed greater instruction on the tenets of CSP in education preparation programs and modeling of practical teaching strategies, such as the use of MCL, to use in the classroom. The participants in this study were able to build connections with students, but unable to dig deeper into the cultural backgrounds, as they focused on student preferences and interests, and therefore were unable to select MCL as an enactment of CSP (Paris & Alim, 2017). The lack of knowledge of the foundational tenets of CSP and its enactment in the classroom were major findings from the data. Due to this, educator preparation programs need to provide stronger instruction around diversity, cultural and equity pedagogies to equip future teachers for the diverse student population they will teach through their content and methods courses

A nodule on the forearm

Glomus tumors are benign tumors of the skin. Clinically, these tumors can present as solid, painful subcutaneous nodules, frequently seen on the hand (particularly subungual region). Glomangiomyomas are the least common histological type of glomus tumor. In the literature, there are only a few glomangiomyoma cases of the forearm location. We report a patient with a painful nodule, diagnosed as glomangiomyoma. Surgical excision was performed and no recurrence was observed after 5 years' follow-up

Fast Penalized Regression and Cross Validation for Tall Data with the oem Package

A large body of research has focused on theory and computation for variable selection techniques for high dimensional data. There has been substantially less work in the big "tall" data paradigm, where the number of variables may be large, but the number of observations is much larger. The orthogonalizing expectation maximization (OEM) algorithm is one approach for computation of penalized models which excels in the big tall data regime. The oem package is an efficient implementation of the OEM algorithm which provides a multitude of computation routines with a focus on big tall data, such as a function for out-of-memory computation, for large-scale parallel computation of penalized regression models. Furthermore, in this paper we propose a specialized implementation of the OEM algorithm for cross validation, dramatically reducing the computing time for cross validation over a naive implementation

Subgroup Identification Using the personalized Package

A plethora of disparate statistical methods have been proposed for subgroup identification to help tailor treatment decisions for patients. However a majority of them do not have corresponding R packages and the few that do pertain to particular statistical methods or provide little means of evaluating whether meaningful subgroups have been found. Recently, the work of Chen, Tian, Cai, and Yu (2017) unified many of these subgroup identification methods into one general, consistent framework. The goal of the personalized package is to provide a corresponding unified software framework for subgroup identification analyses that provides not only estimation of subgroups, but evaluation of treatment effects within estimated subgroups. The personalized package allows for a variety of subgroup identification methods for many types of outcomes commonly encountered in medical settings. The package is built to incorporate the entire subgroup identification analysis pipeline including propensity score diagnostics, subgroup estimation, analysis of the treatment effects within subgroups, and evaluation of identified subgroups. In this framework, different methods can be accessed with little change in the analysis code. Similarly, new methods can easily be incorporated into the package. Besides familiar statistical models, the package also allows flexible machine learning tools to be leveraged in subgroup identification. Further estimation improvements can be obtained via efficiency augmentation

Building Classroom Community in Elementary Literacy Methods Courses

In this article, two elementary teacher educators provide a novel approach to building relationships and classroom community in their face to face elementary literacy methods courses. The authors present their classroom practice entitled “Tell Me Time” (TMT), mirroring morning meetings in K–12 settings, as the staple of building classroom community in their courses. They describe how TMT has been used to build student relationships with each other and with instructors through providing unique, personalized opportunities to socialize and connect through listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Threaded throughout, the authors detail specific feedback from students and highlight how TMT has helped students find common ground with one another and made them feel comfortable, cared for, and respected by their instructors. The authors describe the reasons behind implementing TMT, outline specific TMT activities and examples that have been most effective with their students, provide insight into how to integrate technology with TMT, delineate specific steps for successfully implementing TMT, and describe lessons learned from the implementation of TMT

Low thrust orbit determination program

Logical flow and guidelines are provided for the construction of a low thrust orbit determination computer program. The program, tentatively called FRACAS (filter response analysis for continuously accelerating spacecraft), is capable of generating a reference low thrust trajectory, performing a linear covariance analysis of guidance and navigation processes, and analyzing trajectory nonlinearities in Monte Carlo fashion. The choice of trajectory, guidance and navigation models has been made after extensive literature surveys and investigation of previous software. A key part of program design relied upon experience gained in developing and using Martin Marietta Aerospace programs: TOPSEP (Targeting/Optimization for Solar Electric Propulsion), GODSEP (Guidance and Orbit Determination for SEP) and SIMSEP (Simulation of SEP)