Dixin’s teaching is inspired by a proverb that “give someone a fish, they eat for a day. Teach them to fish, they will never go hungry.” His tutorial classes, therefore, aim not only to help students better understand accounting information (the narrow goal), but also to equip them with a technique to efficiently collect, process, and analyse the information they may encounter in other courses (the broad goal), as well as in their future careers (the ultimate goal). 

To achieve these teaching goals, Dixin developed his distinctive teaching style with three major characteristics:  

(i) Students enjoy delicious “fish dishes” cooked by him. The core value of his class is to help students, especially those with little or no accounting background, discover the best and simplest way to understand accounting jargon (making “fish dishes”), rather than simply regurgitating textbook or lecture contents (feeding on “raw fishes”).  

Students truly enjoy the Feynman technique that Dixin adopted and his usage of emerging technologies to explain abstract accounting concepts. For example, students’ attention was drawn to the interactive in-class dialogues between ChatGPT and him when explaining the accounting concepts of “relevance” and “faithful representation”. They gained a deeper understanding of these two concepts with the “route planning” example returned from ChatGPT.  

(ii) Students chew, digest, and convert “fish” into “energy”. Through a heuristic approach, he always starts a topic by asking questions instead of providing answers or conclusions. In this way, students will explore what they want to know and gain a deeper understanding of accounting concepts, instead of merely memorising them.  

(iii) Students learn how to “fish”. After several weeks of training, guest tutors (students) are invited to lead the class discussion or share their novel problem-solving methods with the remaining class members. By doing so, students’ learning capacity is upgraded from “mere input” to “output”. 

It has been such a pleasure to be in the same teaching team as Dixin. Having a responsible member like Dixin in the team gives me the peace in mind that students are well looked after, and everything is on the right track

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