'Model striver' professor achieves highest score

Guan Shuguang, a professor at East China Normal University School of Physics and Electronic Science, has been honored as a "model striver" in the modern era for his dedication in encouraging students’ interest in academic study and piloting online education.

Guan, a native of Hubei Province, taught physics at Tshinghua University between 1994 and 1998 after he graduated from the Beijing Normal University with a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics. He acquired a doctorate degree at the National University of Singapore in 2003 and became a researcher at its Temasek Laboratories.

Guan returned to China in 2009 and has been working as a physics professor and a supervisor for doctoral students at Shanghai-based East China Normal University. Though busy with key research programs and having published more than 80 papers on physics journals, Guan has been teaching undergraduates at the university with a special interest in optics.

“Optics is an important course for physics students, I insist that it should be advanced and challenging,” he said. “I would not lower the level of difficulty of my classes to please students in attempt to receive favorable comments from them. I usually set high requirement on my students and I’ve never hesitated to criticize students when it’s necessary.”

He said it makes him happy to see former students become successful physicians and talk about frontiers of physics they are working on with him. But he also likes to hear students, many years after graduation, tell him that they  learnt something from his classes.

To make the difficult course interesting, he usually uses interesting phenomena, such as explaining why peacock feathers are colorful, making snow flakes colorful with light, and showing his collection of cameras and photos.

“Learning is always difficult, I would like to make the process fruitful and enable them to feel the happiness and charm of physics,” he said. “It’s just like climbing a mountain. My students are climbing for the first time, but I have climbed many times. I know the scenery after every peak. I can tell them, but I hope they can climb the mountain by themselves. And when they are on the summit, they will know it’s all worth it.”

He is never satisfied with textbooks. Instead, he adds the latest knowledge to his teaching every year. Having taught the course for over 10 years, he still spends the whole day before a class on preparation every time.

Though there are teaching assistants helping him with reviewing students’ homework, he insists on checking each student’s homework and writes down comments. He always walks from the platform during class breaks to talk with students. He knows every student so well that he can know who is absent without a roll call.

“It’s not because I’m good at memorization, but I care about them,” he said. “The responsibilities for teachers are not limited to teaching, but also talent cultivation, so we have to know the people we are teaching. When you check students’ homework, you are getting to know them too. Students will know you do care about them and have expectations of them when you write down comments on their homework and also name them directly to ask them to answer questions in classes.”

His efforts have paid off. His classes inspired many students.

“I was impressed by one student Zhao Jiawei," he said. "She failed the first mid-term test, but she did not give up. She said she loved my classes and worked hard to perform better and better. She later studied physics at the University of Dusseldorf and is now working in Germany."

Another student Qiu Tian was not satisfied with learning. He and two classmates began carrying out research under Guan’s supervision.

Guan said he initially turned down Qiu’s request to join his research team as it was too difficult for undergraduates.

“But he wrote a very long email to me which touched me and I gave them an opportunity,” he said. “He was very active and did very well. Now he has published six papers in top international physics journals, as first author of four of them.”

During the 2016 International Conference on Communications and Computer Networks, Qiu became the first undergraduate in its 12 years of history to win a title of “Best Student Papers.”

Qiu is now continuing his doctoral study at Peking University.

Guan is also innovating his teaching by taking a lead in developing online teaching and combining it with his class teaching.

As online open courses became massively popular around 2012, Guan also began to develop an optics course online with sponsorship from East China Normal University and technology support from a professional company in 2016, and reformed teaching.

With recorded classes, he asks students to study with online resources by themselves and carry out group research on assigned topics in the first week, then present their findings and discuss with other students in the second week in the classroom. He would also solve problems that students cannot solve by themselves. 

“By doing so, I hope to develop their abilities in independent study, critical and creative thinking and group work so that they can solve problems by themselves in the future,” he said. 

“Students were learning in a passive way in traditional classes, but the combination of online and offline study pushes them to play a more active role in learning. Meanwhile, many Chinese students are not good at asking questions, but when discussing with classmates, they dare to challenge each other and inspire each other with really creative ideas.”

The professor also encourages students to point out mistakes in his teaching videos and those who find one can have one point added to their final score.

“In the first two years, about 10 students can find out mistakes every year, some of which were textual mistakes and some were imprecise expressions,” he said. “Now the mistakes have almost all been found.”

To make the communication more effective, Guan reduced the class scale at the university from 80 to 30, but the course is used by more than 3,000 people all over the country each semester now, including students from other universities.

“It’s so encouraging that a man older than 70 took my class,” he said. “He said he loved physics but didn’t have the opportunity to make it his major when he was young. Now he has retired and would like to learn it by himself. He studied very hard and did all the homework and tests. It makes me feel that my work is more meaningful.”

Earlier this year, as many universities began to move their teaching online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Guan did it easily with his students from East China Normal University.

“All the teaching materials were ready and we only had to use an online platform for discussion,” he said.

His course was used by other universities too.

“I found that at least one whole class from Suzhou University took my classes and sat the tests online,” he said.

Guan’s course has been one of the most popular courses in the university for years and has been included into a city-level program for establishment of a series of high-quality online courses. It has also become one of the first 200 online courses selected nationwide to be delivered all over the world.