In the summer of 2018, we attended the FTI Teacher Training Project (Faculty Training Institute, FTI) at Rossier School of Education inUniversity of Southern California(USC), as a team of five colleagues. USC is a world-famous private research leading university, it is located in downtownLos Angelesand has become a global center for arts, technology and international business. It has in all 22 academic schools and units, including theCollegeofLetters, Arts and Sciences. The university is one of the largest private sector employers in the whole region ofLos Angeles, which is responsible for $8 billion annually outcomes in economic activity in this area.

The USC Rossier School of Education is part of theUniversityofSouthern California, it ranked #10 in the field of education and enjoy a good reputation of educational training. This training program provides theory, pedagogy and practice at Rossier School of Education to improve learning and teaching in the university classroom, and this is the 5th year for the exchanging program between our two universities.

We have gained much from this wonderful studying experience in USC, and my summary is as follows:

1、Study

The full-time training course is of high intensity, along with a certain amount of homework.The first weeks’ coursesfocused on the professional and academic writing and reimagining the classroom. Firstly, we had a heated discussion of our philosophy of teaching withprofessorKate. If my teaching philosophy has to be summarized into one phrase, I think that is “Be passionate about your teaching field”, since passion is so important that it is one of the most fundamental factors to have a very successful career in any field. In fact, my teaching philosophy comes from the feedbacks of my students, and I often ask my students at my first class, what do they think separates us from those who are highly successful, like Marie Curie in Science, Dr. Fiona Wood in Medicine. What is it that they have that we don’t? After a heated discussion, their answer always eventually comes to the word “Passion”. After that, Dr. Racines helped us to go through all the academic writing and research protocols and procedures. This section is to make sure that we can apply all these academic research and writing protocols and procedures. At the end of this course, all of us had clearly articulated our own academic research agenda.

The next three weeks’ courses focused on several important pedagogies, such as personalized and project-based learning, gap analysis, active learning, effective discussions, self reflective practice, flipped classrooms and professional problem solving. Among all these good teaching method, I find flipped classrooms and self reflection are most useful to me. Flipped classroom provides students with opportunities for collaborative learning and applying concepts through active processes, therefore it can mobilize students’ enthusiasm for learning a particular pharmaceutical problems, enhance their learning motivation and improve their problem-solving skills. I think both our undergraduate and graduate students atShanghainormal university will benefit greatly from these teaching methods, if we can apply them properly to our own classes.

2、Research

During the training, my researchproposalis “A trial course using flipped classroom teaching model for junior students in learning pharmacology atShanghaiNormalUniversityinChina”. I chose one of my courses” Pharmaceutical Design” as the experimental sample, it is one of the core biopharmacy curricula that form the basis for training and developing trustworthy pharmacists inChina. The identified problem is students’ lack of interests and passions for such a memorization-heavy courses. On the other hand, flipped classroom has been tested as one of the most useful methods to enhance students’ interests and teaching efficiency. Hence, this pedagogy will be used in my research to promote students’ initiative in learning, engage students in their own learning, and motivate the students for active learning. At the final Presentation, I spent about 20 minutes to elaborate this research proposal to the faculties of Rossier School of Education, and I indicated that it can be directly applied to my teaching courses immediately when I am back to SHNU. This idea is also approved and supported by several professors in their school.

3、Exchange and Communication

USC's most famous rival isUCLA, with whom there is fierce athletic and scholastic competition. Hence, we have planed a visit to its campus on weekend. UCLA also enjoys a very good reputation, the newest “Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018” ranked UCLA 15th in the world for academics, No.1 US Public University for academics, and 9th in the world. It became the Southern Branch of theUniversityofCaliforniain 1919, making it the second-oldest undergraduate campus of the ten-campusUniversityofCaliforniasystem. It is worth mentioning that thePowell libraryis one of the most beautiful libraries that I have visited. This library was constructed from 1926 to 1929, as one of the original four buildings that comprised the early period of UCLA campus. Its Romanesque revival architecture design, its historic value make it one of the defining images of UCLA, and also make it also very popular with students.

Besides UCLA, we also visited theUniversityofCalifornia,Santa Barbara(commonly referred to as UC Santa Barbara or UCSB). It also belongs to theUniversityofCaliforniasystem. UCSB is also one ofAmerica's Public Ivy universities, which recognizes top public research universities in theUnited States. This university was ranked 48th worldwide for 2016-17 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The campus, bordered on two sides by thePacific Ocean, has miles of coastline, its own lagoon, around which there are numerous walking and bicycle paths. We gladly chosen one of them to take a walk, and the scene along the beach is really beautiful.

4、Reflections

During this training course, there are about 10 lecturers and professors coming to train us, and I really can feel their passion of higher education as their lifetime passion. All through the whole class, they alwaysmaintained eye contact with us, kept smiling at each one of us when answering our questions patiently. In addition, they always gave us a positive assessment to encourage us.

After this training course, I truly believe that as an educator, we teachers can really achieve a lot of things, if we can truly dedicate ourselves to our teaching careers. Also, I start to profoundly realize that, with the rapid development of pedagogy nowadays, my teaching methods and skills in higher education classroom need to be improved, and new appropriate pedagogy can make my teaching more effective. Based on my USC research proposal above, I’ve decided to carry on this project at SHNU, and try to get the results of this pedagogy research published.

5、Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to give my sincere thanks to all the teachers in the department of human resource and development of our university. Secondly, I want to thank all my four colleagues in this faculty training group to USC. Finally, I really appreciate my family members, who gave me spiritual support and additional help for both my oversea study and family management.