This describes another possible model of an honors program that may be feasible internationally.
Students normally take a certain set of classes. For those in the honors program, some of those may be specially designed just for them. These courses go beyond the normal requirements in some significant way, perhaps including additional research.
However, in this model it is possible for a professor and a student to form a contract in a "normal" course that transforms it into an honors course. The contract will involve additional work of some kind appropriate for the course. The student does the normal work of the course and the fulfills the additional requirements as well. The work might involve additional research and/or writing, up to and including publication. The professor judges the student work as usual and assigns or withholds the honors designation at completion. The work should ensure that the student attains some deeper understanding of the topic of the course, rather than just preforming additional tasks.
A student in the honors program, in this model, may have a minimal number of such special courses or not.
Typically, if the overall curriculum of the student does not require a thesis, the honors student will write on to achieve honors at graduation. For those who are normally required to write a thesis, some additional requirements might be imposed, such as publication, or at least submission for publication.
Managing such a program is a bit challenging. Someone with a deep commitment to the philosophy should be available to assist faculty and students in setting appropriate standards for each such course. A faculty member may be able to amortize the work of guiding such a course over more than one term/student or not.
Such a program could, in fact, be used as part of a program of training future teachers. Some of the additional tasks of an honors course might be teaching part of the course itself, or a closely related course. If this is used, I would assume that the teaching would be supervised and even assisted by the guiding professor.