For 30 years, Isaac Lirwana stood in front of blackboards and watched children raise their hands with answers they did not understand. He taught Mathematics the way the system demanded it; formulas to be memorised, problems to be solved by pattern-matching, examinations to be passed by reproduction. And for 30 years, he felt the quiet dissonance of knowing that the children who scored highest were often the ones least equipped to use what they had learnt. So, he started teaching the people who teach them.
Today, Lirwana is one of Uganda’s busiest trainers of teachers, a ‘resource person’ and a specialist in competency-based item writing. His classroom has expanded from one school to dozens. His students are no longer teenagers but the men and women charged with shaping them. Lirwana has walked into staff rooms and training halls carrying a simple message, if you are still teaching children to give correct answers, you are not teaching at all.
The system that made him
For generations, the national philosophy of education was built on a single adage that education is the key to success in life. Parents believed it. Children suffered for it. But what happened inside the classroom often bore little resemblance to the promise. The curriculum asked children to remember and reproduce. Examinations rewarded what could be written on paper. Critical thinking was a luxury the timetable could not afford.
Lirwana was a Mathematics teacher in this system, working in several Kampala schools over three decades. He knew the pressure. A teacher’s success was measured by examination results. A child’s future was determined by how many correct answers they could fit into three hours. Practical application, real-life context, and the question of whether an answer actually mattered beyond the classroom door were distractions from the urgent business of passing. He began writing his way out of the problem.
The books that teachers needed
Frustrated by textbooks that treated Mathematics as an abstraction, Lirwana started writing the Active Mathematics Series, now published by Oxford University Press East Africa. The books were designed to force learners into confrontation with real decisions. A problem was not merely a calculation; it was a scenario. If you have limited resources, how do you allocate them? If you run a small business, how do you price your goods? If you are farming, how do you measure risk?
But books alone do not change classrooms. Teachers had to be persuaded to use them, and more importantly, to rethink how they stood in front of children.
The trainer’s dilemma
When he walks into a training session, Lirwana is met by professionals who have succeeded under the old rules. Many have been teaching for years. Some are excellent at producing examination results. All of them are now expected to implement the Competency-Based Curriculum, a national shift that moves assessment away from memorisation and toward critical thinking, problem-solving, and practical application. They, however, were themselves educated by memorisation. Lirwana’s job is to close that distance.
‘A child can enter school without capital, a business, land, equipment or even a clear picture of what the future holds,’ he tells them. ‘Yet that same child can leave school with something powerful; the ability to think, analyse situations, make decisions and turn limited resources into possibilities.’
The challenge is that this requires teachers to surrender the script. Under the old model, the teacher knew the answer and the learner was expected to receive it. Under Lirwana’s model, the teacher becomes a facilitator of inquiry. The authority shifts from the front of the room to the problem itself. The teacher must ask: What do we know? What do we need to find out? What choices do we have? What are the consequences? And which decision makes the most sense?
For teachers trained to be the smartest person in the room, this can feel like a demotion. Lirwana has to reframe it as an elevation. The teacher is no longer a reference book but a strategist, helping learners navigate complexity that has no single correct answer.
The practical revolution
What saves Lirwana’s training from abstract theory is his insistence on practical illustration. He does not lecture teachers about critical thinking. He puts them in situations where they must think critically, often using the very Mathematics they thought they already knew. He challenges them to see the consequence of a mathematical decision appearing somewhere else entirely; in a reduced loss, a better-managed project, a more efficient use of resources, an opportunity created where none appeared to exist.
‘The rich resource in Mathematics is in looking at its consequences appearing somewhere else,’ he says.
A farmer calculating yield is doing Mathematics. A trader deciding whether to buy stock is doing Mathematics. A mother managing household expenditure is doing Mathematics. The classroom should be where they learn to do it better, not where they are separated from it. This is the core of his competency-based approach. A learner may know something. But if they cannot apply that knowledge to a real-life situation, they are not fully prepared for life. The examination is a checkpoint. The life is the destination.
The scale of one man’s reach
Lirwana’s influence is difficult to measure in the way education officials prefer. He does not have a district office. He does not sit on examination boards, but the list of where that authority has been exercised reads like a map of Uganda’s educational elite and its aspiring middle tier. King’s College Budo, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious schools. Mengo Senior School, rooted in the capital’s history. Mityana Senior School, serving a rural-urban transition zone. Godmark High School in Mukono, Crane High School, Kololo Senior Secondary School. He has moved between institutions that select the brightest and institutions that serve whoever arrives at the gate, and he has delivered the same message to both; the subject you teach is less important than the thinking you enable.
As a specialist, he also shapes the very instruments by which teachers will be judged. The test questions he helps design ask learners to do. This is not a small distinction. In a system still transitioning from the old examination culture, the person who writes the questions is, in some ways, more powerful than the person who writes the curriculum. Lirwana is therefore operating on two levels at once; he is retraining the teachers who deliver instruction, and he is helping redesign the assessments that validate it. Lirwana does not pretend the Competency-Based Curriculum has solved Uganda’s education crisis. He knows better, having seen too many policies dissolve at the classroom door. Yet he believes change is possible if teachers are equipped to make it; not through new buildings or textbooks, but by shifting from lecturer to facilitator, from answer-giver to question-asker, from examiner of memory to trainer of minds.