On May 6, 2021, for fully and actually implementing tutors’ duty of strengthening moral education and cultivating people, developing a postgraduate tutors team with noble ethics and teaching skills as well as promoting communications and sharing among tutors, the fourth session of Tutor’s Saying of UPC was held in 208 of the Nanjiao Building. Professor Mao Haoran, dean of School of Foreign Studies, delivered a kneynote speech. Sun Daman, associate dean of School of Foreign Studies, hosted the forum. Lv Hongling, minister of Graduate Student Affairs Department of Party Committee of UPC, Zhang Yongning, secretary of Party Committee of SFS all graduate supervisors and managers of graduate education of the university listened to the lecture on the spot or through live broadcast.
Professor Mao Haoran sharing his teaching skills.
The theme of this lecture was “The Blocking Points and Turning Points of Improving Tutors’ Quality”. Professor Mao Haoran, combining his own rich experience, used humorous and interesting language to start from 12 problems that are frequently encountered by graduate student tutors. And he further explained how to cultivate different types of graduate students in various ways, the types of tutors and their characteristics, the core qualities that tutors should have and how to improve them, the difficulties and turning points of tutors in guiding graduate students’ learning, researches and life, how to deal with the incomplete knowledge structure of graduate students, the poor psychological adjustment ability and research habits, how to ensure regular and substantial communications with graduate students, and how to effectively guide graduate students to deal with various confusions, etc.
When talking about the core qualities of a tutor, prof. Mao pointed out that a qualified tutor should work on three aspects: “guiding learning”, “guiding research” and “guiding heart”. The first thing for tutors is to take the lead in “guiding learning”, so that the students can improve themselves every day; “guiding research” means we should focus on training the logical thinking ability, critical innovation ability, management planning ability, literature retrieval and reading ability, and core information condensation ability of graduate students. In addition, Prof. Mao insisted that “one must be strong to forge iron”; “guiding the heart” means we should not only hit the nail on the head, but also respect the respective differences of students, do a good job of psychological construction of students, and come up with ideas and solutions for students, not simply solve problems in a brutal way. Prof. Mao emphasized: Less is more. Teaching and learning nourish each other, and the adaptive renewal of tutors in terms of concepts and behaviors is the top priority of tutors’ literacy improvement. At the same time, when facing controversial points, the correct order of judgment should be factual judgment first, then right and wrong judgment, and then value judgment, and finally moral judgment. He also listed examples to illustrate how mentors can set an example and guide students to “remain true to our original aspiration, and go forward with redundancy deleted”, which means that we should not be distracted by fragmented information and pseudo-propositions.
This lecture is an important part of the “Tutor Literacy Enhancement Project” of UPC, through which the tutors can learn from each other and improve the ability of cultivating postgraduate talents. Besides, the lecture will improve the professional standard of tutors, promote the “inner change” of tutors and improve the quality of postgraduate talents cultivation.
