Timothy Crowley is an Associate Professor in the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Dr. Crowley taught an honors seminar in the spring 2026 semester titled, “Ideas and Ideals in Cervantes’s Don Quixote”
- Why were you attracted to offering an honors seminar?
I’ve loved each Honors seminar I’ve had the privilege to teach at NIU. It’s great to have bright and motivated students from lots of different majors in a special-topic course with a discussion format.
2. How do you teach your subject or specialty to an interdisciplinary group of Honors students?
I choose a course topic that I think will lend itself well to interdisciplinary discussion and begin each class period with prompts written by students in the course for use in their own group conversation.
3. What are some of your tricks of the trade to engage students in the course materials?
I keep all of the student-written class discussion questions in a single file posted continuously on the course page in Blackboard, updating its contents with the next class period’s prompts once I have them from the students, well in advance of the group discussion in class. This way, all students have access to past and present discussion questions that they’ve designed for us all, useful for studying after class periods and for preparation beforehand (especially for students less used to fluid discussion formats in their own major discipline).
4. What’s the best thing about teaching Honors students?
The students themselves! This includes their general capabilities and interest levels as a group but also, especially, their individual personalities.
