From Educating Teachers: The Best Minds Speak Out

Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, was founded as an independent liberal arts college in 1844. Its Mission Statement reads in part, "By training the young in the liberal arts, Hillsdale College prepares students to become leaders worthy of that legacy." Throughout the years, the faculty, administration, and Board of Trustees has taken this statement one step further by preparing only the most qualified students to become leaders who teach the liberal arts within the elementary and secondary grades.

Hillsdale College’s Teacher Education Program is fully approved by the Michigan State Department of Education, as are thirty-one other programs throughout the State. However, many of Hillsdale College’s Program requirements exceed State standards and thereby make the Program unique.

First, no students are ever permitted to major in education. Our students major among the disciplines of biology, chemistry, English, French, German, history, Latin, mathematics, music, physical education, physics, science, and Spanish. The choice of minors we permit is slightly expanded, to include computer science and early childhood education, with early childhood education requiring the addition of a minimum of two liberal arts minors, one of which must be English, history, mathematics, or science. This results in our students’ learning much more about what they will teach than if they took most of their college credits in education courses. At Hillsdale College, "how to teach" has never necessitated the credit hours comparable to those demanded by an academic major.

Only the most qualified students are accepted into our Teacher Education Program. Specifically, students must achieve and maintain a minimum cumulative grade point average of 3.00 on a 4.00 scale. (Students with a GPA between 2.70 and 3.00 can petition to be admitted to the Program by the College’s three academic Deans, the Provost, and the Certification Officer, but such approval is by no means automatic. Student’s can be instructed to reapply when they meet the 3.00 requirement.) No courses which lead to or are a part of the Teacher Education Program are ever audited, so that an accurate GPA is always calculated. Student’s whose GPAs decline below these standards while they are in the Program are not permitted to student teach and therefore cannot become State-certified teachers.

No students are exempt from any courses on the basis of placement tests or on any other basis. This Hillsdale College standard applies equally to College core liberal arts courses, teacher education courses, and teaching major and minor total credit hour requirements. In other words, students who can demonstrate proficiency in an area of study are simultaneously demonstrating readiness for learning at a higher level of study in that area, whether for the benefit of the students they will be teaching or for the benefit of their own liberal arts education.

Our small number of education courses include: "Foundations of Education," "Explicit Phonics Reading Instruction," "The Teaching of Reading to the Exceptional and ESL (English as a Secondary Language) Child," and "Contemporary Problems in Education." In general, the problems we identify in the latter course are the solutions advocated by other teacher education programs.

Two other ways in which we exceed State standards involve student teaching. While all student teachers in Michigan must spend a minimum of 180 hours in a school, Hillsdale College’s student teachers must spend a minimum of 180 hours teaching within their teaching majors and/or minors in a school. Then, when our student’s have reached the 180 hours, they continue adding on more teaching hours until the semester has ended. Our students spend an entire semester in their host schools, Monday through Friday, following their schools’ hours and days of operation.

Although the State Department of Education does not designate specific books which future teachers must read and study, we do. In our education courses, students read from such great works of antiquity as The Odyssey by Homer, Plato’s Dialogues, The Aeneid by Virgil, and On the Good Life by Cicero, and modern books including Talks to Teachers on Psychology by William James, How to Read a book by Mortimer Adler, Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch, and Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong by William Kilpatrick.

Our education courses also include examples from the K-12 content of the College’s Hillsdale Academy. Hillsdale Academy’s K-12 curriculum was selected in its entirety by two of Hillsdale College’s education professors, both experienced elementary and secondary school teachers and administrators. The College’s Provost then employs a headmaster who is to ensure that the curriculum’s scope and sequence are implemented in full. This benefits not only the county’s children enrolled at Hillsdale Academy but also our Teacher Education Program students, who are able to observe the teaching of this curriculum by Academy teachers who have already completed Hillsdale College’s Teacher Education Program or who are in the process of doing so. In the words of a State evaluator of our Program, "The fine cooperation between the unit [Hillsdale College’s Teacher Education Program] … and the Hillsdale Academy is laudable and a fine model of the type of collaboration other schools and school districts desire." This includes our placing student teachers at Hillsdale Academy every semester.

In addition to the approval of the Michigan State Department of Education, Hillsdale College’s Teacher Education Program’s effectiveness is recognized by other independent sources. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan, writes, "[W]hile Hillsdale may be virtually alone in its diagnosis of the modern educational disease, it is confident that the future of teaching lies in the practices of the past." The National Monitor of Education in Alamo, California, writes, "the Hillsdale approach to teacher training is solid meat and potatoes, a practical approach opposed to theoretical, pie-in-the-sky doctrines often advocated in teacher training programs. There would be few, if any, failures of new teachers in the classroom if as student teachers they had the opportunity to participate in programs similar to Hillsdale’s."

As of this writing, Hillsdale College has a six-year 100% placement rate for those students who graduate with a teaching certificate and seek to start their teaching careers the following school year. According to the College Registrar, if the students admitted to the Teacher Education Program were collectively considered as having one and the same major, the Teacher Education Program would be designated as having more students than does any other major that the College offers. Some of these students’ placements are in the very schools, public and private, in which the students complete their student teaching. Will Carlton Academy, a local charter school, hires our students, as does Hillsdale Academy. This is not to suggest that all our students teach in Michigan, for our students have been recruited from as far away as Arizona. On a related note, our education professors have advised schools from North Carolina to Nebraska to California on how to identify competent teachers and how to retrain those just out of college. Hillsdale College even operates a Center for Teacher Excellence and provides full scholarships so that our teachers can improve their classroom effectiveness. While Hillsdale College’s Teacher Education Program graduates tens of liberal arts teachers each year as opposed to the hundreds of education major teachers from state universities, our teachers do not need to be retrained and are effective in the classroom starting on their first day.

We welcome visitors to all our education courses on campus, and we can arrange for guest observations of our student teachers off campus. We also keep Hillsdale Academy open for tours, and we make available for consultation the education professors responsible for the Academy curriculum.

The faculty, administrators, and Board of Trustees of Hillsdale College actively implement the College’s Mission Statement. By preparing liberal arts teachers, Hillsdale College’s Teacher Education Program is always providing the next two generations, that is, teachers and their students, with the wisdom and value of a liberal arts education.

Hanna, Robert, "The Hillsdale Approach to Education" in Educating Teachers: the Best Minds Speak Out, ed. George C. Leef, American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Washington, D.C., June 2002.

Hanna, Robert, "The Hillsdale Approach to Education," Education Matters, January 2003; 1,6.