Emerging engineering education is posing new challenges to the cultivation of professional talents. As the traditional core course of water supply and drainage science and engineering, the course of water quality engineering is both theoretical and practical, involving a wide range of professional knowledge and is comprehensive. It is necessary to focus on the connotation of emerging engineering and national major needs, and to reform and innovate the course. Aiming at the problems existing in traditional teaching, based on the student-centered approach, we design the multi-level teaching objectives according to "knowledge exploration, capacity building, and value guidance", update the teaching contents in line with the latest developments in the industry, design teaching activities based on the multi-dimensional teaching objectives, and carry out teacher-guided and accompany-style autonomous learning mode. We innovate teaching organization through the adjustment and integration of the sequence of teaching links, and use various classroom forms such as interest experiment introduction, case analysis, classroom debate, flipped classroom, etc., assisted with new information technology, to achieve value guidance by intensifying curriculum-based ideological and political education, and to build a full-cycle systematic evaluation system.