On the morning of October 18, 2015, at the invitation of the Institute of International and Comparative Education, Prof. Andreas Schleicher, who is called "the Principal of the World" and "the Father of PISA (Program for International Student Assessment)", gave an academic presentation titled Preparing Students for the 21st Century at Room 502, No. 9 Teaching Building. The presentation was hosted by Prof. Liu Baocun. About 200 BNU students and faculty members and primary and secondary school principals and teachers being trained at BNU attended the presentation.

Prof. Andreas Schleicher is a Special Advisor on Education Policy to OECD’s Secretary-General and Deputy Director for Education. He also provides strategic oversight over the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). He studied Physics in Germany and received a degree in Mathematics and Statistics in Australia. He has published many influential papers and is a recipient of numerous honors and awards.

In his presentation, Prof. Andreas Schleicher first talked about 2 trends that will influence education in the 21st century, which are technological change and changing societies. Changing societies refer to the facts that populations are aging, more and more people are living in cities and an increasing number of children are bullied online and offline. With those trends in mind, he then analyzed the challenges and implications for the 21st century educators and learners. He believed that to make change happen, regrouping educators, regrouping learners, rescheduling learning and widening pedagogic repertoires are necessary. Educators and teachers should take on their roles as a facilitator to students’ inquiry, allowing learners to think of solutions to practical problems and give them a sense of belonging and engagement through experiential and interactive learning. For the 21st century learners, knowledge, skills and metacognition are the key to make a difference. The three aspects of the value of knowledge are practical value, cognitive value and emotional value. Examples of skills include creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, innovation, data gathering and communication, etc. Metacognition refers to learners’ abilities to reflect on their learning goals, strategies and results, which refers to self-awareness, self-regulation, self-reflection, self-adaptation, lifelong learning and learning strategies, etc.

Towards the end of the presentation, Prof. Andreas Schleicher proposed that performing professionalized teaching and building leadership for professional learning, especially principals’ leadership, are two most important ways to cope with the challenges technological change and changing societies have brought. A profound and heated discussion session followed after Prof. Schleicher’s presentation. The presentation received high appreciation from all the audience.