What exactly are the characteristics of honors pedagogy? What are the teaching strategies that are particularly relevant and successful for academically gifted and motivated students? In spite of the substantial body of literature about the practice of honors education, largely referring to the United States, very little systematic and empirical research has been done about honors pedagogy. This study contributes to a better understanding of honors pedagogies, focusing not just on what might distinguish honors teaching and learning from standard expectations and methodologies but also on how honors pedagogy offers both instructors and students an opportunity to fundamentally rethink their philosophy of education. The present study points out the similar and different approaches and dispositions in American and Dutch honors teaching. Cultural differences, distinctive educational systems, and diverse priorities play a role in defining both the shared and unique perspectives on honors education in both countries. Therefore, a baseline comparison is made between American and Dutch honors teachers with respect to their teaching strategies.
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Students differ in their learning preferences. When students are more intrinsically motivated this improves their well-being and involvement (Levesque, Zuehlke, Stanek, & Ryan, 2004). Teaching highly motivated honors students places different demands on teachers (Wolfensberger, 2012). High motivated students prefer teachers who offer them autonomy and who supports their need for autonomy by offering structure by an autonomy supportive teaching strategy (Reeve, 2009; Vansteenkiste et al., 2012) . Honors teachers indicate that they struggle with finding the right balance between providing autonomy and structure, which is different for every student. In our research we focus on how higher education teachers tailor their teaching strategies towards the perceived learning preferences regarding autonomy and structure of both honors and regular students. We conducted semi-structured interviews with help of a topic list with 16 teachers of 4 institutions and used a grounded theory approach to analysize the data. Because the subjects in this study teach both in honors and regular educational programmes, we gained insights in the underlying beliefs about and strategies used in these two different contexts. In this talk we share our findings and explore how the results can be used in daily practice.
