Secondary school teacher helping primary pupils excel

The cheerful and talkative Francis Bizoza Bigirimana is a teacher of English at Lusenke Primary School, a church-founded Universal Primary Education school in Lusenke village, Luweero District.
The 27-year-old is also co-founder and team leader of Teachers Empowerment Platform (TEP) a platform for teachers in underserved communities that offers them continuous professional development, training and support.
An old student of St Henry’s Primary School, Namuwongo and St Paul’s Seminary, Kabale where he spent six years of high school, Bizoza, like many students, was not certain of which career path to take after secondary school.
“I always admired journalists because my brother was working for the BBC at the time. But this was a secret desire I knew was pointless because I was sure my parents could not afford it. And when my brother committed to pay for my university education, he tasked me to look for a course we could afford. I settled for education and specialised in Literature in English and English Language at Makerere University. I was convinced that with this, I could eventually get back into my dream journalism course,” he recounts.

Making up his mind
But Bizoza would later grow to love education and not turn back. “A key turning point for me was when I met my mentor Olivia Mugabirwe, my lecturer then (2013) who used learner centered methods of teaching and learning. She used information communication technology, radio talk shows, songs, testimonies, panel discussions, field studies, social media and the Internet to enhance learning. These were all methods that I had never experienced anywhere during my school time!” he says.
All he knew was the way he was taught; rote learning and at best, the lecture method.
“I resolved that if I was going to teach, I would be the teacher that allowed students to take charge of their learning. From there on, I started enjoying my course, became serious, focused, committed and determined to make the best out of it,” he says.
Bizoza with a few of his coursemates who wished to be linked to in-service teachers and teacher educators for collaborative learning and mentorship, they asked their lecturer to continue working with them beyond the module. He notes that by doing so, they wanted an opportunity to master and make use of learner centered methods of teaching and learning.
Together, they formed working teams, held capacity building training workshops, and built a network through social media. It is out of these continuous meetings that Teachers Empowerment Platform (TEP) was birthed in 2013.

The change
However, in 2016 while teaching at St. Joseph’s Secondary School, Nansana, the teacher of English took an unusual interest in a primary school that was in the neighbourhood.
“Often, I strolled there and observed how learning was taking place. It is then that I was drawn to primary education. I realised that if I wanted to make the kind of impact I wanted in learners, starting earlier in primary would be a good idea!” he said.
And while still contemplating this, and a switch from secondary to primary teaching, an opportunity to join Teach for Uganda, an organisation that trains young professionals and places them in rural underserved communities to impact the learning outcomes came his way, and he did not hesitate to take it. From 2018 to date, he has been volunteering at Lusenke Primary School where he was placed after the training.
However, he cannot hesitate to share how shocked he was with this new reality about how children in rural Uganda were learning; the conditions under which they studied, hunger, lack of basic scholastic materials, limited access to water among the daily challenges.
“Now that their reality had become my reality, how could I just show up, teach and go? How could I just watch my fellow teachers talk their way through a lesson day in, day out with no actual learning happening? I realised that although I could not solve all problems, I could try to make sure that when learners came to school, they were learning,” he says.

Raising the stakes
Using his connections, he organised a field day for his fellow teachers to GEMS Cambridge School in Kampala where they were exposed to different ways of teaching, and resources to use.
“As an educator, seeing pupils in the two classes I teach become confident gives me satisfaction. This, I have built overtime through affirmation and use of positive language and sharing my personal story,” Bizoza says, proudly.
In addition, he has seen his pupils push themselves to read unsupervised. “We do not have a lot of resources in the school but we made a mini-makeshift library in the Primary Four class. Children borrow textbooks and the few readers there,” he says.
The 27-year-old’s dream is to create spaces where teachers collaborate and share skills for improvement. He hopes teachers appreciate, adopt and employ methods of teaching and learning that help students learn so that the time children spend in school is not wasted.