At 10:00 in the morning of November 30th, 2018, Queen Mary University of London Engineering School, NPU (hereinafter referred to as QMES) held a Mid-term Teaching Meeting in the Student Common Room 411, Block A, Teaching East Building, Chang 'an campus. The meeting was hosted by Prof. Andy Bushby, Executive Vice Dean of QMES. Dean and Prof. Kong Jie, Vice Dean and Prof. Fan Xiaoli and more than 20 lecturers and student representatives attended the meeting.

First of all, Andy Bushby warmly welcomed the arrival of the lecturers, and introduced the main contents and purposes of the annual meeting, and raisedseveralquestions. Mr. Matthew Potter, Dr. Gabriel Cavalli, Dr. Shi Xuetao and other lecturers have expressed their opinions on this issue.

According to Fan Xiaoli, good outlook on life and values are the driving forces behind a student's future career. She emphasized that there was a great difference between teaching and teaching students to learn. It was necessary for the lecturers to motivate the students to think on their own so that they would keep abreast of the classroom content.

Next, Personal Development Planning lecturer Matthew Potter threw out three questions about improving students' employability, including measures, resource allocation, and specific types of capabilities. The discussion that follows was enthusiastically carried out among the lecturers.Andrew Spowage, a lecturer on Introduction to Engineering Materials, proposed that we should know more about the demands of enterprises for employees, not only in class and books, but also to broadened students' horizons, so that they could have more contact and communication with enterprise experts and practice problem-solving ability.

As the representative of the Chinese lecturers, Dr. Xiao Manyu introduced her staged achievements and experience in Linear Algebra teaching in the third session, involving classroom interaction and assignment design, and emphasized the significance of group discussion and cooperation.

The fourth part of the meeting focused on the freshmen and sophomore students' previous teaching. The freshman students reported the learning situation and difficulties of the them in the General physics, Advanced Mathematics and Introduction to Engineering Materials, as well as suggestions for improvement in the difficulty of the comprehensive module content, the agenda and teaching resources. The leaders of QMES and lecturers responded positively to students’ suggestions.

In addition, sophomores had harvested a lot after a year of study, with abilities improved such as teamwork ability and critical thinking. They proposed that launching activities in college level and cooperating with other colleges to offer class was an indispensable part. In this regard, Prof. Kong Jie, Dean of QMES, hoped that students should actively contact the professors and grasp the opportunities through exchangeprogramme.

Finally, Vice Dean Prof. Fan once again appreciated the contribution of all participants. She said that the academic meeting was a very important part of the teaching work of the higher education. It had built a platform for Chinese and English lecturers to learn from each other, promoted each other, and shared resources. The meeting mobilized the lecturers to develop teaching affairs and methods, improved work enthusiasm of the classroom, and played a leading role of excellent lecturers, which promoted the professional growth of the lecturers.

Reporter: Eve Ding

Photographer: Eve Ding/ Sun Zhiyuan

Reviewer: Fan Xiaoli