Honors courses will encourage students to develop:
Academic Diversity
- Engaging with multiple disciplinary perspectives
- Employing primary sources, conducting research, developing teaching skills, and engaging in creative activities
- Exploring, making, and discovering connections between different field and knowledge bases, and relevance to the student experience
- Developing skills in creating, evaluating, and applying knowledge
- Developing skills to create, evaluate, and understand all artistic modalities
Creativity and curiosity
- Modeling and inspiring thinking that is original
- Encouraging confidence to take intellectual risks
- Generating new questions and creative techniques beyond established canons
- Challenging students with complex materials
Critical thinking and lifelong learning practices
- Encouraging appreciation for continuing and continuous learning and discovery
- Teaching skills in analysis and reflection
- Providing consistent opportunities to contribute to curriculum topics and discussion questions
- Developing teaching skills
- Promoting curiosity and love of learning
Intellectual confidence
- Fostering the drive, motivation, ability, and resilience to thrive on constructive criticism
- Cultivating open minds that can reevaluate previously (and currently) held positions
- Developing socially conscious students who engage in inclusive, respectful, and honest dialogs
In order to help students develop these skills and qualities, honors courses will include many of the following best-practices:
- Higher-level reading, writing, and public speaking than non-honors courses (within reason)
- Assuming significant responsibility for their own learning and their classmates’
- Teamwork and collaboration
- Independent inquiry
- Presentation of art, ideas, research, discoveries
- Narrative and project-based research reports
- Critical and creative uses of technology and media
- Flexibility - options to choose topic, project, or modality
- Experiential learning
- Global perspectives
Some of the activities that embody these best practices and facilitate the development of these skills include:
- Small group discussions
- Peer review
- Outside the classroom activities – panels, museums, performances, movies, documentaries, exhibits, meals related to course content
- Off-campus field trips
- In-class debates
- Games / Simulations of concepts
- Collaborative books and designs
- Trace ideas and concepts to their original sources
- Open-ended problems
- Reflections
- Incorporate information literacy and new technologies in partnership with the libraries
- Creation or design projects
- Group projects and assignments, including those with students outside of UF
- Video conference with global experts for a discussion
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