Advice, Guidelines, and Best Practices for Each Honors Course
This guide provides advice and best practices for each of the four kinds of honors courses offered through the Honors College and its partner Schools at Rutgers.
Departments and professors design honors courses in different ways, but in general, we find that the most successful honors course experiences ...
- Provide students with closer contact with faculty.
- Present students with a more challenging or in-depth experience (e.g., more experiential-based activities, more extensive investigation of implications and connections, etc.) than they would have in a non-honors section or course
- Design a course that is intended to enrich the learning of students from all or many of the School-based communities across New Brunswick/Piscataway.
In addition to more personal engagement, some of the ways that faculty and departments create an honors experience include:
- Trips, involving fieldwork or performances or cultural interaction
- Special or additional work (problem sets, essays, exercises)
- More in-depth work (longer essays, expanded scope of materials)
- Outside speakers (in person or via Skype or similar platforms)
- Special research experiences (in the field, the lab, or archive or involving particular kinds of research papers)
The Honors College also works with the active-teaching faculty at the outset of each semester in order to talk about what it means to be in the Honors classroom, how we approach various pedagogical and practical matters, and how the honors approach is one of the most rewarding experiences for all involved.
Four Broad Categories of Honors Courses
- Interdisciplinary Honors Seminars
- Honors sections of departmental courses
- Honors-specific departmental courses
- +Honors Contract Course contracts
Questions?
Please feel free to contact J.D. Bowers, Dean of the Honors College, to discuss teaching for the Honors College and to express interest in designing an honors class.