The background of teaching reform of high-rise building structure design course was analyzed; based on teaching practice of the course, the teaching problems of complex contents, boring teaching process, alienated theory from engineering practice, unreasonable assessment methods and other problems existing in the course were analyzed and summarized. In order to improve college students' engineering practice ability, teaching reform for the course was suggested and explored, the measures including adjusting teaching contents, emphasizing structure concept, increasing the teaching of structure design software, perfecting assessment mode and so on.