Principals’ Instructional Leadership Practices and Their Relationship to Teachers’ Instructional Practices in Sharjah Schools.

Instructional leadership has become one of the most widely researched topics. This type of leadership has been connected to teacher growth and development, teacher job satisfaction, student achievement, and improving school climate in general. This study focuses on instructional leadership in schools of Sharjah Education Zone. Specifically, the study aims to describe the principal instructional leadership practices, to identify the most and least important teachers’ instructional practices, and to investigate whether there is a relationship between the principals’ instructional practices and teachers’ teaching practices. This study is quantitative in nature and therefore a questionnaire was used to collect data from teachers in 24 schools in Sharjah. The sample was 111 male and 269 female teachers with a total of 380 teachers. The study found that principals in Sharjah schools practice certain tasks of instructional leadership more than others. For example, they care more for framing the school goals, providing incentives for learning, and evaluating instruction than maintaining high visibility, protecting instructional time, and providing incentives for teachers. With regards to teachers’ instructional practices, it was found that teachers focus on certain practices more than others. They provide attention to students working in groups, stating the lesson goals, checking students’ exercise books than, for example, asking students to write essays to demonstrate their creative ideas, giving them projects that last for some time, and holding debates in the classrooms. Finally, the study found a positive relationship between principals’ instructional leadership practices and teachers’ teaching practices. In other words, when the principal attends to certain leadership practices, the teacher gives more attention to certain instructional practices. This relationship was stronger in areas of monitoring students’ progress, providing incentives for teachers and protecting teachers’ instructional time

PRINCIPALS\u27 INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERSHIP PRACTICES AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO TEACHERS\u27 INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES IN SHARJAH SCHOOLS

Instructional leadership has become one of the most widely researched topics. This type of leadership has been connected to teacher growth and development, teacher job satisfaction, student achievement, and improving school climate in general. This study focuses on instructional leadership in schools of Sharjah Education Zone. Specifically, the study aims to describe the principal instructional leadership practices, to identify the most and least important teachers\u27 instructional practices, and to investigate whether there is a relationship between the principals\u27 instructional practices and teachers\u27 teaching practices. This study is quantitative in nature and therefore a questionnaire was used to collect data from teachers in 24 schools in Sharjah. The sample was 111 male and 269 female teachers with a total of 380 teachers. The study found that principals in Sharjah schools practice certain tasks of instructional leadership more than others. For example, they care more for framing the school goals, providing incentives for learning, and evaluating instruction than maintaining high visibility, protecting instructional time, and providing incentives for teachers. With regard to teachers\u27 instructional practices, it was found that teachers focus on certain practices more than others. They provide attention to students working in groups, stating the lesson goals, checking students\u27 exercise books than, for example, asking students to write essays to demonstrate their creative ideas, giving them projects that last for some time, and holding debates in the classrooms. Finally, the study found a positive relationship between principals\u27 instructional leadership practices and teachers\u27 teaching practices. In other words, when the principal attends to certain leadership practices, the teacher gives more attention to certain instructional practices. This relationship was stronger in areas of monitoring vii students\u27 progress, providing incentives for teachers and protecting teachers\u27 instructional tim

Transient And Distributed Algorithms To Improve Islanding Detection Capability Of Inverter Based Distributed Generation

Recently, a lot of research work has been dedicated toward enhancing performance, reliability and integrity of distributed energy resources that are integrated into distribution networks. The problem of islanding detection and islanding prevention (i.e. anti-islanding) has stimulated a lot of research due to its role in severely compromising the safety of working personnel and resulting in equipment damages. Various Islanding Detection Methods (IDMs) have been developed within the last ten years in anticipation of the tremendous increase in the penetration of Distributed Generation (DG) in distribution system. This work proposes new IDMs that rely on transient and distributed behaviors to improve integrity and performance of DGs while maintaining multi-DG islanding detection capability. In this thesis, the following questions have been addressed: How to utilize the transient behavior arising from an islanding condition to improve detectability and robust performance of IDMs in a distributive manner? How to reduce the negative stability impact of the well-known Sandia Frequency Shift (SFS) IDM while maintaining its islanding detection capability? How to incorporate the perturbations provided by each of DGs in such a way that the negative interference of different IDMs is minimized without the need of any type of communication among the different DGs? It is shown that the proposed techniques are local, scalable and robust against different loading conditions and topology changes. Also, the proposed techniques can successfully distinguish an islanding condition from other disturbances that may occur in power system networks. This work improves the efficiency, reliability and safety of integrated DGs, which presents a necessary advance toward making electric power grids a smart grid

Concept of motivation in Islam.

This research study aims to explore the concept of motivation from the Islamic perspective, which is explored to a poor extent. It seeks to shed light on Islām and how it motivates its followers to behave appropriately while fulfilling their needs and desires, guided by the Holy Qur’ān and Ḥadīth. A comprehensive literature review is conducted to study and understand the various perspectives presented by other scholars on human psychology and motivation specifically from the perspectives of Islām, Christianity and Jewish cultures. This study adopts a qualitative approach and focuses on gathering secondary data from a broad range of sources. The data collected is then analysed in an interpretative yet subjective manner. To achieve the aims of this research, the emphasis is laid on gathering both comprehensive secondary data from the religious journals and academic books. The evidence was gathered from the holy books of these religions which include Holy Qur’ān, Bible and Torah. From the findings of the research, it was concluded by the researcher that Islām significantly highlighted and differentiated from Christianity and Judaism in endorsing motivation among its followers. It is identified that Allāh created mankind to spread His word and to perform His actions. He motivated humans by offering them certain rewards and making them fearful of the consequences in case they fail to follow His commands. This thesis provides greater insight into the role played by Islām in motivating human beings to live a life in a way that is beneficial here on earth and in the afterlife. This study is expected to contribute further to the collective knowledge and understanding of motivation and human behavior

A novel approach to solve power flow for islanded microgrids using modified Newton Raphson with droop control of DG

The study of power flow analysis for microgrids has gained importance where several methods have been proposed to solve these problems. However, these schemes are complic ated and not easy to implement due to the absence of a slack bus as well as the dependence of the power on frequency as a result of the droop characteristics. This paper proposes simple and e ffec- tive modifications to the conventional method (Newton Raphs on) to compute the power flow for microgrids. The presented metho d provides a simple, easy to implement, and accurate approach to solve the power flow equations for microgrids. The propose d method is applied to two test systems: a 6-bus system and a 38- bus system. The results are compared against simulation result s from PSCAD/EMTDC which validate the effectiveness of the develo ped method. The proposed technique can be easily integrated in current commercially available power system software and c an be applied for power system studies method is applied to two test systems: a 6-bus system and a 38-bus system. The results are compared against simulation results from PSCAD/EMTDC which validate the effectiveness of the developed method. The proposed technique can be easily integrated in current commercially available power system software and can be applied for power system studies

A simple and accurate approach to solve the power flow for balanced islanded microgrids

Power flow studies are very important in the planning or expansion of power system. With the integration of distributed generation (DG), micro-grids are becoming attractive. So, it is important to study the power flow of micro-grids. In grid connected mode, the power flow of the system can be solved in a conventional manner. In islanded mode, the conventional method (like Gauss Seidel) cannot be applied to solve power flow analysis. Hence some modifications are required to implement the conventional Gauss Seidel method to islanded micro-grids. This paper proposes a Modified Gauss Seidel (MGS) method, which is an extension of the conventional Gauss Seidel (GS) method. The proposed method is simple, easy to implement and accurate in solving the power flow analysis for islanded microgrids. The MGS algorithm is implemented on a 6 bus test system. The results are compared against the simulations results obtained from PSCAD/EMTDC which proves the accuracy of the proposed MGS algorithm

Consanguinity and reproductive health among Arabs

Consanguineous marriages have been practiced since the early existence of modern humans. Until now consanguinity is widely practiced in several global communities with variable rates depending on religion, culture, and geography. Arab populations have a long tradition of consanguinity due to socio-cultural factors. Many Arab countries display some of the highest rates of consanguineous marriages in the world, and specifically first cousin marriages which may reach 25-30% of all marriages. In some countries like Qatar, Yemen, and UAE, consanguinity rates are increasing in the current generation. Research among Arabs and worldwide has indicated that consanguinity could have an effect on some reproductive health parameters such as postnatal mortality and rates of congenital malformations. The association of consanguinity with other reproductive health parameters, such as fertility and fetal wastage, is controversial. The main impact of consanguinity, however, is an increase in the rate of homozygotes for autosomal recessive genetic disorders. Worldwide, known dominant disorders are more numerous than known recessive disorders. However, data on genetic disorders in Arab populations as extracted from the Catalogue of Transmission Genetics in Arabs (CTGA) database indicate a relative abundance of recessive disorders in the region that is clearly associated with the practice of consanguinity

Critique of the review of 'Water fluoridation for the prevention of dental caries' published by the Cochrane Collaboration in 2015

The Cochrane Review on water fluoridation for the prevention of dental caries was published in 2015 and attracted considerable interest and comment, especially in countries with extensive water fluoridation programmes. The Review had two objectives: (i) to evaluate the effects of water fluoridation (artificial or natural) on the prevention of dental caries, and (ii) to evaluate the effects of water fluoridation (artificial or natural) on dental fluorosis. The authors concluded, inter alia, that there was very little contemporary evidence, meeting the Review's inclusion criteria, that evaluated the effectiveness of water fluoridation for the prevention of dental caries. The purpose of this critique is to examine the conduct of the above Review, and to put it into context in the wider body of evidence regarding the effectiveness of water fluoridation. While the overall conclusion that water fluoridation is effective in caries prevention agrees with previous reviews, many important public health questions could not be answered by the Review because of the restrictive criteria used to judge adequacy of study design and risk of bias. The potential benefits of using wider criteria in order to achieve a fuller understanding of the effectiveness of water fluoridation are discussed

Robust Non-Linear Observer For Islanding Detection Of Inverter Based Distributed Generation

This paper provides the design of a robust nonlinear adaptive observer for the purpose of islanding detection of inverter based Distributed Generation (DG). The non-linear observer provides simultaneous online estimates for the amplitude and frequency of a noisy sinusoidal signal where amplitude estimation values will be used to determine the existence of islanding condition or not. The main goal of this paper is to provide analytical derivations and proofs of robustness and convergence for the proposed non-linear observer and to utilize results of proposed observer for the islanding detection problem. The IEEE 34-bus system with inverter-based DGs is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed observer. © 2012 Institute of Engineers

Development Of Current Dynamic Estimator For Islanding Detection Of Inverter Based Distributed Generation

Various Islanding Detection Methods (IDMs) have been developed within the last ten years due the tremendous increase in the penetration of Distributed Generation (DG) in distribution system. This paper proposes a new resident passive IDM in which a dynamic estimator is designed based on the system dynamics during islanding occurrence. The dynamic estimator estimates the amplitude of the current injected by the grid at the point of common coupling with the DG. The estimator can also determine the flow direction of grid current. The main goal of this paper is to provide transient analysis for the islanding detection problem and to approximate the Non-Detection Zone (NDZ) of the new passive IDM. Moreover, estimator sensitivity to grid amplitude, frequency and angle variations and disturbances will be studied and simulated. ©2010 IEEE