The Honors Program succeeds only through the sustained involvement of university faculty committed to excellence in undergraduate education. We have many opportunities for faculty to be involved and we encourage you to join the Honors Affiliate Faculty by teaching an Honors course or advising a student working on their Senior Honors Project.
In Honors, faculty get to teach small discussion-based classes and work one-on-one with talented and motivated students. They can try new pedagogy, develop new content and enjoy a deeper intellectual relationship with undergraduate students. Faculty often feel reinvigorated as a result of teaching an Honors course and routinely report that it provides one the best teaching experiences of their career.
Compensation is provided to departments in the form of lectureships, graduate teaching assistantships, or funds for other pedagogical purposes. Some funds may be available for course development over the summer.
Please consider teaching Honors!
There are several courses that faculty can teach. For example, you can:
The Honors Program invites faculty to make proposals for courses each academic year. Please submit your proposal materials by email at honors@hawaii.edu.
If you would like to teach an Honors course, please email us a proposal: for the seminars HON 291 and HON 491 please follow the guidelines provided in the files below
For "A Section" courses and HON 190 sections, please contact your department chair.
For other courses please send a letter of interest to the Director of the Honors Program.
Please email all proposal materials to honors@hawaii.edu.
All Honors courses must incorporate principles of inquiry-based learning so that students develop skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and written and oral communication as they develop their capacity to conceive and carry out independent research and creative work. The instructor should not be the source of knowledge, particularly in the form of the lecture, but should develop activities in which students a discover knowledge for themselves through reading, research, and discussion.
We have collected some general resources on the philosophy and practice of inquiry-based learning together with some useful tips:
Inquiry-based learning and teaching
All Honors syllabi must state explicit course-based Student Learning Outcomes which should be consistent with the hallmarks of the specific honors courses and articulate with the Honors Program Learning Outcomes.
Some examples of SLOs for particular courses are provided in the guidelines above, but you might also want to see some general resources on the philosophy and practice of assessment in higher education. For example, see:
The Honors Program also strongly encourages the use of Universal Design for Instruction in its courses to ensure maximum accessibility for all learners. Please see:
At the very least, the Honors Program requires that all syllabi for Honors courses contain a statement about accommodations for disabilities, such as the following:
All Honors courses must be evaluated using the services of eCAFE, operated by the Office of Faculty Development and Support. The Honors Program provides a set of standard questions for all Honors courses, based on hallmarks and program learning outcomes, but instructors are free to add their own questions from the wide-range available within eCAFE. Instructors should submit complete copies of their evaluations to the Honors Program when they are received from OFDAS.
The Honors program provides lectureships for courses, either as salary for instructors who are not regular faculty, or as a means to "buy out" regular faculty from one of their departmental courses. The home department may use the money for any instructional purpose.
