Sandra Tietjens

Sandra Tietjens has been working at the Mercator Institute since 2020. Since 2025, she has been part of the team FKOM Sprachbildung in the Startchancen programme, where she designs and delivers training programmes for teachers and multipliers on topics relating to language education. 

Previously, she was involved in the Schule macht stark (SchuMaS) project and led courses in the continuing professional development programme Weiterbildungsstudium Deutsch als Zweitsprache and in the module Deutsch für Schülerinnen und Schüler mit Zuwanderungsgeschichte (DaZ-Modul) for students on all teacher training programmes at the University of Cologne.

As part of her teaching activities, she offers professional development courses in the third phase of teacher training. Her main areas of focus are multilingualism didactics, reading didactics, language-sensitive teaching and German as a second language.

She studied in Munich, Lille and Cologne and in her thesis, she focused on language integrated strategies in classrooms during the practical semester of student teachers at the University of Cologne. Prior to her work at the Mercator Institute, she has worked as a mentor for scientific writing, as a team leader in a project conducting assessments of personal potentials of teenagers, and as a teacher of German as a second and foreign language in different institutions.