TUSP's 2026 Teacher Training Course

In March 2025, The Uganda School Project (TUSP) brought together 21 teachers and headteachers from Soono and Bumakenya Primary Schools for a 'World Café Technique' workshop - a participatory exercise designed to identify the real, context-specific challenges our teachers face every day, and the strategies they use to address them.

That workshop shaped four training topics: managing overcrowded classrooms, developing low-cost teaching aids, positive discipline management, and gender-sensitive teaching.

A year on, those insights have become a full Teacher Training Course, delivered successfully in March 2026 to 24 teachers across Bumakenya and Soono:

What the course looked like

The course ran across five-weekend cycles: a full-day training session, a micro-teaching session where teachers practised new techniques with their peers, and a "Teaching Practice" session where they tried it out in their own classrooms during the week, with a peer observing.

This cycle - learn, practise with peers, then apply live in the classroom - meant teachers weren't just hearing new ideas, but testing them with peers (microteaching), then with pupils in a live classroom setting during the week, and coming back the following weekend to reflect on what worked and what didn't. This internalises the theory and helps to create lasting behavioural change.

The four topics chosen by teachers during the World Café were brought together under one practical framework: Cooperative Learning (CL). CL means putting pupils into small groups with assigned roles - a leader, a reporter, and so on - so that even in a class of well over 100 pupils, every child has a job to do and a chance to participate - particularly relevant ion our intervention schools in Namisindwa District, where classrooms have have 100-150 pupils in each class. It's an approach already encouraged in Uganda's national curriculum guidance, but one that takes real training and practice to use well.

Each teacher received a booklet that included the insights gathered from the 2025 World Café session, reflective exercises, lesson planning templates, and a course timetable.

What teachers said

The strength of this course was that it didn't ask teachers to discard what they already knew, it asked them to build on it. One teacher reflected that "cooperative learning helped me manage a class of 120 through assigning roles to group members, forming groups." Another noted that the method "involved all categories of learners e.g. boys, girls, children with a disability."

The sessions on classroom discipline encouraged teachers to think about how their own teaching methods and classroom routines shape pupil behaviour, and th example they set, rather than focusing solely on individual pupils' conduct. One teacher reflected that "sometimes we blame learners for discipline problems without seeing how our own teaching methods contribute to them," while another noted that "if as a teacher I am not clear on the instructions that I'm giving my classroom, then it is me going to cause indiscipline because the learners will not know what to do." Teachers recognised that shifting habits takes time, with one noting "we need follow-up support and refresher training so that we continue improving."

The session on gender bias prompted similarly candid discussion. Looking at textbook images, one teacher pointed out that "the textbook images suggested that women should not be in high positions because here the doctor is a man and the nurse is a woman." Another pushed back on assumptions about ability, arguing that "if you give them opportunity, same opportunity, the same support, even girls can excel in maths."

By the end of the course, one headteacher put it simply: "with the knowledge that we are getting, we shall not remain the same." Another teacher connected it directly back to where this all started: "we have now implemented what was passed during the World Café."

What’s next?

For us, a training course is only as good as the educational improvement it creates, so we have built a framework that continues to evaluate the impact well beyond the final training session.

TUSP staff will now observe each teacher's classroom practice every two months, using a standard observation form, to track how Cooperative Learning is being used day to day. Around 144 pupils will also take part in child-friendly group questionnaires, sharing their own views on what's changed in their classrooms. Literacy and numeracy outcomes will continue to be tracked across the schools, with the next assessment due in October 2026.

Looking ahead, future World Café workshops will continue to shape what training comes next - and disability-sensitive pedagogy has already been identified as a priority for future courses. With construction of a third school expected to begin later this year (pending funding!), the plan is to bring teachers from that school into the same training model, alongside the teachers who've already completed it, supported by an added mentoring scheme.

Checkout a video of the training here, and the full report here

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And remember YOU can support ALL our efforts, including more teacher trainings and a new school construction, HERE!