About This Project

A group of teachers from Spain arrived in Dublin in June 2023 for a job shadowing placement in Limerick, focused on dentistry and teacher training and organised by IBD Partnership Group. The group made their own way to their accommodation.

The week combined a cultural visit of Limerick with professional site visits across health, education and community services. It closed with a certificate ceremony at Arthur’s Quay, hosted by Caoimhe, before the group departed for Spain.

What the Teachers Did

Friday was deliberately easy, just a cultural visit to settle everyone in before the working week started. Monday wasn’t.

The group spent the morning at a daycare centre for older people, watching staff run structured activity alongside close one-to-one care, essentially differentiation in action, the same session adapted on the fly for a dozen different needs. More than one teacher said afterwards it was the clearest model of differentiated teaching they’d seen outside a classroom.

Tuesday was stranger territory. A pharmacy visit at Parkway Shopping Centre, then a dental laboratory on John’s Street, watching trainees get assessed on work measured in fractions of a millimetre. Teachers don’t usually spend a Tuesday afternoon thinking about vocational assessment standards for dental technicians, but this group did, and it gave them something to measure their own marking rubrics against.

Wednesday closed things out at an afterschool facility in Kileely, where Science Coordinator Ugis walked the group through cross-disciplinary STEAM methods. A handful of teachers said they’d already sketched out how to adapt one of the activities for their own classrooms before the week was even over.

About IBD Partnership Group

Could a single site visit teach a teacher as much as a week of them? Unlikely. IBD Partnership Group has organised international job shadowing and professional development placements since 2005, more than 50,000 participants from across Europe, and the value has always sat in the accumulation, one visit building on the next rather than any single stop doing the work alone. Schools or institutions looking to organise a job shadowing placement can contact us today.