Holistic thinking is one of the geographical key competences. Cultivating students' holistic thinking is the core essence of middle school geography education. Taking the second-year students of a certain middle school in Yangzhou as the research subjects, the study obtained students' holistic thinking data through holistic thinking measurement tools and supplemented by semi-structured interviews. It analyzed four reasons for the low level of students' holistic thinking from the perspective of infl uencing factors, and proposed four teaching strategies, including selecting geographical problems with comprehensive characteristics for teaching; ensuring the holistic thinking dimension coverage of the geographical subject mind maps; guiding students to draw the geographical subject mind maps; and training students' holistic thinking based on the geographical subject mind maps, considering the infl uencing factors. The post-test results confi rmed that the four teaching strategies based on the geographical subject mind maps can eff ectively improve students' holistic thinking competence.