As a part of compulsory courses for junior and senior students majored in urban planning, the urban investigation takes the core position of practical courses and has the characteristic of cross-academic-year series of courses. The teaching process is mainly based on social investigation of students and is different from traditional courses mainly concerned with classroom-teaching. We focused on the exploration and practice of teaching reform, adjusted and perfected the teaching system and course contents, specified the direction and methods of cultivating students’ values and abilities, introduced the student-centered constructive teaching attitude and several constructive teaching modes “adapted to different stages of teaching process”, and explored and formed a scientific and effective system of process monitoring and achievement evaluation. The teaching reform has achieved good teaching results and improved the teaching quality steadily.