2025-11-27

Teaching Statements That Travel Across German Faculties

How to describe your teaching without sounding interchangeable—and without ignoring local study regulations.

A teaching statement written for a North American search rarely lands well in a German faculty file. Committees look for evidence that you understand modular degree structures, examination formats, and the difference between Bachelor and Master supervision loads.

Replace abstract philosophy with two or three courses you could run in the first four semesters, including assessment methods. If you have taught in another language, state how you would adapt materials for a German-language module.

Student evaluations help when they are contextualised: class size, whether the course was mandatory, and what you changed afterward. A single glowing quote without context carries little weight.

If you have limited classroom experience, be honest and emphasise mentoring of theses, lab instruction, or workshop teaching. Inflating a guest lecture into a full teaching portfolio is easy to spot and hard to recover from in interview.