I want to devote my second Teaching Excellence Award to all my students and colleagues who have provided me continuous support and encouragement during my days at CityU. Life, like mine, is full of ups and downs, and therefore, I wish our students can be life-long learners, never give up their chance to "be the best that they can be", and fully enjoy their life, no matter what!

The TEA is not my individual award; without the support from our colleagues and students, such an award is impossible! Especially thanks for the programme leader and the 11 students/alumni who have nominated me in this round of TEA.

I believe that a teacher's passion to help their students is the most important driving force to quality learning and teaching. With such a passion, good learning and teaching practices will emerge naturally. My learning and teaching philosophy is that learning always comes before teaching. Accordingly, the primarily role of a teacher is to act as a helper or facilitator to motivate students engaging in their self-discovery processes rather than trying to teach students to follow a specific model. As indicated by other colleagues, teaching and research inform each other. I'll continue to follow my passion to engage in both quality research and teaching in coming years.

I feel deeply honoured to have been nominated by my MBA students for the Teaching Excellence Award. When I look back over my 13 years of teaching, I am surprised how far I have come. There are no short cuts to excellent teaching, and no universal solutions either, though caring for one's students and learning with them are critical in my own view. Having a passion for teaching certainly helps a lot, as does a passion for research, since the two very often inform one another. Fundamentally, excellent teachers need to be able both to listen and to tell, both to integrate ideas and to facilitate discussion. I find it helpful to break up my class time into chunks of varying durations, with a variety of activities, some more formally structured, some more loosely organised, some with demonstrably appropriate answers or solutions, some where the main objective is to get students to explore a problem in all its richness and natural detail, where there is no pre-defined target, where the conversation between the students and myself is unpredictable. It is this variety of interaction opportunities that awakens students to the fun of learning, to unconscious learning by doing, and in turn, to andragogical excellence.