Honors pedagogy: tailoring learning preferences of honors and regular students for autonomy and structure

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.