Highflyers Development towards Professional Excellence: Education for Professional Excellence, synopsis of the book Hoogvliegers, naar professionele excellentie

Abstract

In higher education in the Netherlands, many educational programmes have been developed in recent years for 'highflyers', students who wish to achieve more and are able to achieve more than regular programmes offer them. At the beginning of the 1990s, the universities of Utrecht and Leiden started so-called honours programmes and many other institutions for higher education followed suit with similar programmes. In the last decade, numerous honours programmes have emerged, each with its own character. Some programmes focus on the characteristics of excellent professionals within a professional domain. Since the latter are relatively new, their contents, structure and pedagogical approach are undergoing a rapid development. To stimulate this development, the experience of a number of universities of applied sciences and research universities with honours programmes with a specific focus on professional excellence have been combined in this book. By providing background information and the results of scientific research, we have tried to add more depth to thinking about honours education and to make the experience acquired accessible to a larger group of interested parties. A large group of teachers in honours education have been willing to to make a contribution to this book as authors. This has resulted in diverse examples with a wide variety of aspects of honours programmes which focus on the development of professional excellence.