Abstract
In German schools, gifted education becomes more and more relevant, but it is still rare
 in universities. University students in teacher education especially have only few opportunities to develop their talents in special programs like honors programs. This paper presents the results of a project in which student teachers designed three workshops on the basis of their own interests and strengths and planned these with school teachers.
 To begin with, an overview over the honors programs in Germany is presented. The control and development of pedagogical diagnostics are discussed by a focus group from the perspective of the trainee teachers who developed the workshops for gifted gymnasium (i.e. grammar school) students, including their reflection of the degree of autonomy they experienced. The evaluation data were analyzed by the method of qualitative text analysis (Kuckartz, 2016) with a focus on the categories ‘autonomy and control’ and ‘pedagogical diagnostics.’ The central topic is the experience of competence in these fields.
Highlights
Honors programs for university students and, in particular, for student teachers are hard to find in Germany
How did the trainee teachers experience their participation in a series of self-designed workshops focusing on their descriptions of competence development? That is the core question
Considering autonomy and control, there is a need for balance
Summary
Honors programs for university students and, in particular, for student teachers are hard to find in Germany. There are two reasons for this: First, in German history, the term ‘Begabung’ is connected with National Socialism (Hoyer, Weigand & Müller-Oppliger, 2013), so there is an equation of gifted education on the one hand and fostering the elites on the other. This equation was shown in particular by institutions like the so-called ‘Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten’. (abbreviated as Napola), in which the Nazis tried to educate the generation of military leaders This discourse continued for 70 years after World War II (Hartmann, 2004). Impulses from educational policy give schools more space to explore gifted education (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [Federal Ministry of Education and Research], 2018)
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