The fusion of aesthetic education with vocational training constitutes a necessary evolution dictated by both societal progression and the demands of contemporary times, with each element enhancing the other. This study proposes a pathway for the construction of aesthetic education courses tailored to the current educational objectives of vocational undergraduate institutions. It also introduces a teaching model designed to foster aesthetic sensibilities structured around the ADDIE instructional design framework. Moreover, this research employs the 2023 student cohort from HZ Vocational College as subjects for a comparative experimental study to empirically analyze the effectiveness of the aesthetic education teaching approach. An enhanced clustering algorithm, which integrates multi-point optimization, was applied to assess the development of students’ aesthetic spirit. Additionally, a regression analysis model was used to investigate the various factors influencing the cultivation of this aesthetic spirit, providing a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the proposed educational interventions. The results show that after the teaching, the mean values of student evaluation, self-evaluation, parent evaluation, and teacher evaluation in the five aspects of recognizing beauty, experiencing beauty, feeling beauty, appreciating beauty, and creating the beauty of the students in Class A of the sample are higher than those of Class B by 4.90, 4.08, 3.40 and 4.13. Their p-values are all statistically significant at 0.000<0.05. The ADDIE-based aesthetic education teaching model can effectively cultivate students’ aesthetic spirit and provide important value references for the reform and development of aesthetic education.