• Original, engaging course topics;
• Seminar style teaching (instead of lecture);
• Interdisciplinarity;
• Production of significant student work suitable for presentation or inclusion in an Honors Capstone portfolio.

You can expect to encounter highly-engaged, enthusiastic students in Honors courses, but they come from a variety of majors across campus. Because of this, an Honors class should not be taught like upper division courses in your field. Instead, you will want to plan your teaching in a way that contextualizes course content and anticipates questions of relevance or meaning. Discipline- specific theories or language will need to be translated. The questions you field might be irreverent in the sense that they come from outside a particular disciplinary framework. This diversity makes for wonderful discussions during class!

Please also remember when planning your Honors course that we are an open-enrollment program. We accept every student who wants to join. Our graduates achieve high GPAs at the end of their undergraduate experience, but they may come to us in search of challenge and inspiration. With this in mind, please consider allowing students to resubmit their work for a better grade or to drop a low score before final grades are tallied. If a student wants to do better, let them. 

• Improve your teaching skills, especially in discussion-centered pedagogies;
• Develop a new, innovative course and teach it in-load;
• Work with a small group of talented students;
• Support high-impact student work, including creative and critical projects suitable for presentation in public forums, such as the Honors section of the “Undergraduate Research & Engagement Symposium” (held each year in April).
• Co-teach with a professor outside your department or college;
• Enhance your tenure file. 

If all of this sounds interesting to you, please submit a course proposal. We offer 1-credit hour and 3-credit hour course options. 

We also offer one Eccles Faculty Fellowship each semester, which provides 6-hours of pay to your department so you may use 3-hours as release time for publishing or presenting around your course idea. 

More information on all of these teaching options can be found on this webpage. You may also contact Christy Call at ccall2@weber.edu