Krista Sarginson

Krista Sarginson approaches learning with an enthusiasm, passion, wonder and excitement that is contagious and inspiring. I worked alongside Krista in the Special Education department at the Ottawa Catholic School Board for almost a decade as an Assistive Technology teacher. In this role, I witnessed Krista find seamless new ways to support accessible and inclusive learning for all students. She pushed back against assistive tech as having to be the clunky, big, embarrassing stuff of years past. She found ways to empower students with learning disabilities to experience being the expert in the room with tools such as speech to text, coding, robotics. This school year Krista chose to go back to classroom teaching and it was not surprising that as the year unfolded so too did the wonder and joy of learning in her classroom. Her approaches to Math are concrete, real life and exciting. Workflows live digitally and shared online so that students are able to learn at their own pace – reaching ahead and checking back. When she called me to tell me about entering a cyber security contest with her grade 6’s – I was in awe of the undertaking and proud of her passion to be vulnerable, take learning risks alongside her students. All year – I watched the posts from her students as they learned an incredible timely and future ready skill of cyber security. I won’t pretend to know the correct verbiage – but running operating systems such as Linux and the pressures of time to solve problems while real programmers worked against them -Krista saw her grade 6’s all the way to place second in Canada. She taught not only the computer skill but the communication, maturity, problem solving and confidence that comes with working together as a team in a high pressure situation. Krista did all this, the year she decided to return to the classroom. She challenged herself to a change, to push forward with her own learning and spark excitement and wonder in her students. I am so proud to learn from Krista and to call her a friend and colleague. I believe she is truly one of Canada’s best teachers.