Author: Prof. Zhou Wengui
Ⅰ. SCBC has a beautiful dream.
South China Business College (SCBC) has a bold ambition. As a privately-funded independent college it always bears a beautiful dream: to build a century-old prestigious college with first class teaching and high-quality talent cultivation. To realize this dream it is absolutely necessary for all staff and faculty members to work diligently, to dedicate heart and soul and to entirely devote their whole intelligence and wisdom.
Ⅱ. SCBC is facing challenges and opportunities.
Internally, SCBC is terribly troubled by a lot of difficulties, lack of governmental financial assistance, short of qualified faculty and administrative staff with a rational age structure, professional title structure and educational background structure, no sufficient teaching and academic research resources which could be utilized by the college, and a general backwardness of its hardware facilities. Externally, as a small-scale college, SCBC is basically incomparable with the other independent colleges and public-funded universities. That situation gives SCBC a very great pressure in the current higher learning education competition.
Every coin has its two sides. It is an objective existence of the above-mentioned challenges indeed. It also objectively exists that SCBC actually has its own comparative advantages and opportunities to reach its development target.
The most important aspect here is that SCBC, as a privately-funded independent college, would be endowed larger autonomy in its conventional running. That gives SCBC and its faculty members and administrative staff a larger room and more opportunities to practice college teaching reform and to promote innovation of the talent cultivation mode in order to blaze a new trail in our country’s higher education development in the new century.
SCBC, by scientifically analyzing the competition situation and its own conditions, has made a decision of shining its education brand, the obvious college-running characteristics, high-level foreign language teaching and prominent practical training. At the same time, SCBC will devote itself to cultivate qualified talents with a wider international vision, a solid professional basis, a high ability of cross cultural communication, a strong practical spirit and a perfect practical ability, who are capable of directly participating international economic cooperation and competition.
Ⅲ. Qualified instructors: a decisive and determinant factor to reach that goal.
Ultimately, the essence of relationship between SCBC and its students can be concluded as a supply-demand relationship in market. In this market the customer is always right! All sorts of teaching activities must be organized based on student-oriented principle. In other words, students must be the center of all of our works. As the demanders the students should enjoy their right to acquire the best education as well as the first class teaching and living facilities. As the supplier SCBC is responsible to provide the students with the high quality educational products the best one of which should be excellent course teaching.
For teaching in SCBC, the emphasis should be put on improving and increasing the students’ ability to use foreign languages, especially English, in thinking, analyzing, discussing and handling realistic professional issues and problems based on SCBC’s obvious educational characteristics. However, traditional education mode of English teaching and studying have only created groups of university graduates with a relatively low English language ability featured as “deaf English” and “dumb English”. That phenomenon is so bad and it absolutely does not adapt to requirement of the time and society to foster qualified talents.
In order to drastically change that phenomenon SCBC, based on deepening teaching reform and innovating education concepts and ideology, has taken a set of approaches to integrate professional course teaching closely with English utilization. The major action is initiating all-English teaching or bilingual teaching in professional course delivery. In doing so, the students are capable of learning professional knowledge in economics and management taking English as the working language. Their English language ability, especially the ability to use English as a tool to deal with professional issues and problems, can be really increased. People will never see the so-called “deaf English” and “dumb English” at all!
In steadily increasing the over-all teaching and talent cultivation quality a sufficient number of qualified instructors always play a decisive and determinant function. In some sense one can say without sufficient number of qualified instructors SCBC can never reach its long-run development goal and its beautiful dream can hardly come true!
Ⅳ. Qualification of excellent all-English or bilingual teaching instructors.
To shine education brand of SCBC and to reach its goal of talent cultivation, especially to successfully implement all-English or bilingual teaching program, we urgently need a sufficient number of qualified instructors. Those instructors should be rigidly qualified in the following aspects:
1. Those instructors should be experts in specific academic fields. So that they can have the voice-power in discussing professional issues and problems, they are able to exactly master the essential framework of the text books and teaching contents, their academic research achievements can be effectively integrated into conventional course teaching, and their course teaching quality can be really improved.
2. Those instructors should be so good in English, including standard and typical pronunciation, classic and elegant intonation, accurate and precise wording and phrasing, and fluent and logic expression. So that they can proficiently and smoothly use English as working language in their regular course teaching and they will be able to communicate with the students in discussing specific professional issues and problems. In this way the students can establish a professional conceptual structure and to develop their capability of concerning and discussing professional issues in using English language.
3. Those instructors should be in style of preciseness and stringency. Excellent instructors should devote particular care to “the gentleman-like demeanor” or “the faire lady temperament” so that they can imperceptibly show the students quintessence of the exotic culture via their speech and deportment. In this way students taking all-English or bilingual teaching courses can effectively acquire a well cultural edification.
4. Those instructors should be so perfect to grasp and to apply advanced teaching concepts and ideologies so that they can appropriately reform teaching content of the courses and provide the students the updated knowledge and the whole set of professional information. That is of great help for the students establish a relatively solid knowledge foundation for their future study.
5. Those instructors should be capable of practicing the effective teaching art and of utilizing a set of teaching methods and approaches in course teaching. So that the class teaching can be transformed from the instructor-orientation style into the student-orientation style. It can be finished in limited teaching hours and the main knowledge points can be efficiently understood and mastered by the students.
6. Those instructors should be industriously enough both in their conventional course teaching and in all the other works of relevant departments and schools. That is to say they must perform so well and to be the outstanding examples following by their colleagues. Recently the objective standard to evaluate performance of all-English or bilingual teaching instructors is of course the teaching quality assessment each semester. Taking this standard instructors’ teaching performance is manifested in scores they have acquired and their ranking, top or low.
Ⅴ. Innovating assessment and management system of all-English or bilingual teaching instructors.
According to relevant regulation of SCBC those instructors who intend to deliver all-English or bilingual teaching courses must participate into special training program. Those applicants or candidates successfully passing a comprehensive evaluation will be awarded certification to deliver all-English or bilingual teaching courses. Currently, 30 instructors are qualified (19 come from School of International Economics and Finance and 11 are in School of International Management).
Actually, in the past three years the most qualified instructors worked so diligently and performing so well. They insisted in delivering courses in English and took a lot of measures to improve their class teaching. In addition they spent much of their energy in regular operational activities of relevant departments and schools. Whenever they were assigned temporary tasks they always finished them with high quality in time. Because of their diligence and working performance which are well received and highly regarded by the students and colleagues they were usually ranked high in teaching quality assessment. Winners in the late teaching contest, Lihua, Huangyue, Kejun and Danqing, are the best of best and outstanding representatives. Thanks to their excellent working performance they are awarded by the college and have been appraised by the students and their colleagues.
Let’s call a spade a spade. There are indeed a small number of instructors working not so hard and performing not so well. In accordance with statistics, their scores in teaching quality assessment were not high and they ranked at even the lowest in relevant schools. They do not concern themselves with working affaires of departments and schools and cared only about themselves. What’s more, a very few instructors usually expressed so much complain whenever there came some conflicts between public interests and their own interests.
We never allow such situation goes on! Now it’s time for us to readjust assessment and management system of all-English or bilingual teaching instructors. We will take a “bottom-out mechanism”. That means those instructors ranked at the lowest (the last two) in teaching quality assessment of relevant schools continuously in two semesters will automatically loss their qualification as all-English or bilingual teaching instructors. Their certifications will be cancelled. They have to be trained again if they still want to be re-qualified.
Ⅵ. Staying true to the mission, striving for excellence and devoting ourselves to realizing the dream of SCBC.
Indeed, to implement the innovative assessment and management system implies that all-English or bilingual instructors will face more challenges and competitions. But dialectics tells us competition is the best environment for any people to improve his working condition. In a sense no competition exactly means mediocrity. Just as an old saying goes: “One does not make progress like an oil well does not flow oil without pressures”.
Competition is not horrible. The key point here is adhering to firmly hold a positive mentality, to always engrave the glorious mission in our mind, to deeply implement education reforms, to steadily increase our working ability, to actually formulate our core comprehensive competitiveness, and to gradually improve our teaching quality.
SCBC adopts an education pattern of “comprehensive knowledge, excellent specialty, foreign language proficiency and practical skills”. The talent cultivation objective of SCBC is to cultivate versatile, down-to-earth, and international-oriented talents who are well-equipped with ideological quality, professional skills, cross-cultural communication competence, the ability to employ information technology, and capable of directly participating into international cooperation and competition. The college itself has locked its long-run development target to build a century-old prestigious college with first-class talent cultivation quality.
With that so clear development target and the road to reach this goal, we are sincerely aware of that what we have done, what we are doing, and what we will do must have a great significance in a long-run construction and a sustainable development of SCBC. We, the qualified all-English or bilingual teaching instructors, should be quite proud to shoulder such glorious mission and to take such responsibility to forge the distinct teaching characteristics of SCBC. Let’s work hard to make SCBC more prosperous in the future! SCBC’s dream must come true!
Thank you!
June 3, 2017