Structural dynamics is an important postgraduate course in civil engineering. It has several teaching difficulties, such as strong theory, many abstract concepts and complicated formula derivation. In order to respond to the needs of industry change under the background of new engineering, stimulate students' enthusiasm for learning structural dynamics, and make it more practical to promote students to carry out scientific research, the reform of the teaching mode of this course based on the idea of promoting research by learning is explored. Firstly, computer-aided teaching can be combined to realize the algorithm introduced in the textbook by programming, and the dynamic analysis of typical structures can be visualized by finite element software. Then, the teaching form of "engineering - research - teaching" can be adopted. The teaching content is combined with the research frontier, the teaching case is combined with the engineering practice, and the thinking mode of interdisciplinary is integrated. Finally, the teacher-student interactive inquiry teaching mode is carried out, the classroom is returned to the students, and students are organized to read scientific and technological literature, share communication and complete research group coursework, and then improve the evaluation method of the whole process. The reforms of the teaching mode of structural dynamics are explored, aiming at stimulating students' enthusiasm for scientific research and engineering practice, therefore, students can master the basic scientific research methods and software skills.