Plan II Honors Program

Call for Proposals

After meeting her first class in Plan II, a senior professor said,"THIS is why I wanted to be a teacher."

Plan II Honors is seeking faculty from all disciplines and all colleges to teach exceptionally bright and motivated students with a wide variety of interests.

What is Plan II? Plan II is a challenging interdisciplinary undergraduate honors program leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree. With 70 years of success, it differs from most honors programs in that its core curriculum is itself a major. The major curriculum includes humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, resulting in a fine general education. In the end, our students' research and writing skills are put to the test in an exacting senior thesis requirement. Plan II students' interests vary dramatically. More than half of the 800+ Plan II students are simultaneously completing other majors or even second degrees in other colleges.

Plan II Course Proposal Form

Scheduling and Room Request Form

Questions or to submit proposals, CVs and evaluations:

Plan II Honors Courses

DEADLINE FOR 2008/2009 PROPOSALS: SEPTEMBER 24, 2007

Elements of the Plan II Curriculum

Plan II Honors welcomes proposals in these categories:

Most of the proposals submitted are for the freshman tutorials, junior seminars or the year-long freshmen world literature course.

World Literature (TC 603, E 603)
An intensive course in composition and literature, this year-long seminar is required of all first-year Plan II students. Faculty from the Departments of English, Classics, French-Italian, Spanish & Portuguese, and Germanic Languages have recently taught this course.

Freshman Tutorials (TC 301)
These seminars study engaging interdisciplinary topics through multiple short writing assignments, discussions and student presentations. Every first-year Plan II student must take one three-hour seminar. Recent tutorial topics include Right and Wrong in Politics, India and the West, and The Business of Music Performance.

Honors Social Science (SS 301)
This one-semester course, often taken in the second year, introduces students to the methods and materials of social science, usually from the perspective of one discipline. Recent offerings include economics, anthropology, sociology, government and psychology, and a theory course team-taught by instructors from two of these disciplines.

Junior Seminars (TC 357)
Every Plan II student must take two junior seminars. These seminars should incorporate the instruction of research methodologies and usually require a term paper as part of our students' preparation for the required Plan II senior thesis. Recent TC 357 topics include Psychology and Religion; Lawyers, Ethics and Justice, and Communitarian Social Thought. See this important note on Junior Seminar Requirements.

Modes of Reasoning (TC 310)
This is a relatively new rubric for courses introducing students to formal structures for reasoning. We invite faculty in the sciences or technology to develop courses in areas such as logic, computer science, number theory, operations research, or statistics and probability. Previously offered TC 310s include: An Introduction to Bayesian Inference and Statistical Reasoning about Human Behavior.

Guidelines for Proposing a Course and Teaching in Plan II Honors

Approval and Funding

Please obtain the approval of your chair before proposing a Plan II course. Plan II cannot pay the salaries of local faculty, and professors must be released from their departments to teach for Plan II. We can help with support for teaching assistants for large courses and may have funds to pay for special course expenses. Faculty earn teaching load credits for Plan II courses, just as for departmental courses.

Photo Release Form

We ask all our instructors to download, complete and submit the photo release form.. If Plan II Honors is free to use photographic images of you on the Plan II Honors web site and/or publications, please sign and submit the form. The photographs we might use would include photos of you at Plan II events, meeting, classes, or celebrations (Parents' Day, Graduation, class meetings, award ceremonies, Voltaire's Coffees or Voltaire's Cinemas, Joynes Events, etc.).

If you do not wish us to use any photographs with your image on our website or in our publications, please state so on the form, sign and submit it.

Please be aware of the possibility that your image may appear in group shots containing more than 12 people.

Plan II Students

Most professors find Plan II students to be highly motivated and a pleasure to teach. This year, the average SAT of Plan II entering freshmen was 1444, and 18% of the class were valedictorians. Areas of interest vary widely: although many Plan II students concentrate in the humanities, substantial numbers major in science, business, communications, fine arts, or engineering.

Topics

First-year tutorials (TC 301) and junior seminars (TC 357) may be offered in virtually any subject taught at the university, but Plan II courses should not be identical to regular department offerings. In general, the Advisory Committee does not approve proposals for courses that are regularly offered in the professor's department. Most Plan II courses are interdisciplinary in content and approach.

Format

Please keep in mind that TC 301, E/TC 603, and TC 357 are undergraduate seminars which should be designed to involve lots of discussion and should encourage students to explore the topics. Lecturing should be kept to a minimum. Reading in Plan II courses should be mainly from primary sources. In general, students would rather have a stack of books to buy than an anthology.

Two recommendations from the Plan II Curriculum Committee:

Students should not be involved in compiling data for the professor's research.
Film screenings should be held outside class time, if possible.

Assignments

Plan II courses usually contain substantial writing components. Whether they are designated SWC or not, they should make students write and write and write. In first-year courses, we've found frequent short writing assignments (3-6 pages), starting the first week or two of classes, are more effective than long papers. Most freshmen aren't ready to write a long term paper, and most need guidance on their writing from the outset. In junior seminars (TC 357), term papers of about 20 pages are usually appropriate. We also recommend the assignment of formal oral presentations in seminars.

Exams

We encourage faculty to give final exams, particularly in freshman classes. Students have reported that a well-conceived final exam helps them pull the course material together. Final exams may only be given during the exam period. Please try to avoid giving hour-long exams during the last week of class, when students are often completing major papers.

Enrollments

Enrollments in Plan II courses are kept low. The ideal size for a seminar or the freshman world literature course is 16 or smaller. Plan II classes are usually open only to Plan II students, but in some cases may be cross-listed with departmental honors courses.

Note: We can promise you a small class, but we cannot promise you that your section will be full. Junior seminars rarely have more than fifteen students — a good size for a class with intense discussion, frequent papers, with extensive comments from the professor on each paper. We allow our students to select their courses according to their academic interests and strengths up to the limit in each class. Some professors hope to have enrollments of 18, in order to secure extra teaching load credits for courses with substantial writing components. We can offer no assurances that they will have classes of this size.

Guidelines for Course Descriptions

Your description will play an important role in attracting students to the class, especially if you are new to Plan II or are not known to our students. What you submit to us now (though you will have the chance to revise it later) is what students will see when choosing their courses during registration. The description should give a sense of the content and scope of the course, and why it would be of interest, but it does not need to be as detailed as a syllabus. Yours should include the following:

general description of the content, concerns, and goals of the course
list of the major course readings (if you are using an anthology, please specify works to be read.)
list of course requirements, including writing assignments (please specify number of pages expected for each paper); quizzes; midterms and exams; and oral presentations. Please indicate if course is to be a substantial writing component.*
grading policy, specifying how grade is determined (with percentages if possible). The Curriculum Committee strongly recommends that weekly class participation count for at least 15% of the final grade. Please specify (with a percentage) how much class participation will count in the student's final grade.

Please keep in mind that your description should convey a sense of why the course would be of interest to students. It helps to put your topic in the context of a larger intellectual landscape. This is especially important for topics that might be unfamiliar to most students.

* From the College of Liberal Arts Substantial Writing Component Course Certification Requirements:

The course must include at least three writing activities per semester, exclusive of in-class quizzes and examinations.
A major rewriting of paper (requiring original writing, not merely editing) can be considered a separate writing activity.
These three or more writing activities must total approximately 16 typewritten, double-spaced pages, or about 4,000 words.
During the course, each student must receive a timely and detailed critique following each writing activity concerning the quality of the students’ written expression and ways in which the paper may be improved.
The quality of a student’s written expression must be an important component in determining the student’s course grade.

Online information on the required SWC information and forms

Teaching for Plan II