Santosh Zachariah:
We have to be able to give our students the skill that metacognition skill of I’m not judging your product to tell you whether we’re creative or not. I’m trying to give you the skills for you to be able to reflect on it, be curious about what happened at what stage that led to this outcome.

Matthew Worwood:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin.

Cyndi Burnett:
How can educators foster intrinsic motivation and create learning environments that fuel creativity? In this episode, we’ll explore how positive psychology and developing foundational skills can shape classrooms where students feel engaged, curious, and empowered. If you’re looking for strategies to nurture creativity, guide curiosity, and affirm non conformity in your students, this conversation will be packed with insights you don’t want to miss.

Matthew Worwood:
Yes, because today we welcome to the show Santosh Zachariah. Santosh has spent the past 15 years teaching STEM to late elementary and middle school students at the Evergreen School, where he also serves as the Educational Technology Coordinator. His career path has taken him from civil engineering to biomechanics research to software development at Microsoft. At Evergreen, he is deeply involved in their Strategic Growth initiative, which focuses on fostering creativity in students. So, Santosh, welcome. We’re happy we’ve got you here.

Santosh Zachariah:
Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Cindy.

Matthew Worwood:
So, Santosh, I referenced a little bit about your background. It’s extensive. You’ve got a lot of experience working in the STEM fields. So before we kind of get into some of the meat of our conversation today, I wondered if you could just share a little bit about your journey transitioning from the STEM field into education. And we’re particularly interested to understand what motivated that transition. And also how has that interdisciplinary background that you have within STEM informed what you’re currently doing at the.

Santosh Zachariah:
Thanks, Matt. It makes me have to knit a story to a set of diverse events, but looking back, I think I get bored easily. And looking back now, I find that about seven years is when I want to be doing something different from what I did before. That’s one. So that has positioned me well now in that I have done multiple careers. And looking forward, it seems to be that most of the school students of today will have multiple, if not multiple jobs. Definitely multiple jobs, probably multiple careers. And so the way I see my education is to prepare learners for multiple careers, which might be different from traditional school, which had a pathway of you went to middle school, you went to high school, you went to college, you found a pathway and you stuck with it.

Santosh Zachariah:
So that’s one. The other was that when I finished college, I was extremely grade motivated. I went into college wanting to be the best in my class. I graduated because I kept track of the sex in my class. But when I graduated, I realized that chasing grades didn’t prepare me for knowing what I wanted to do. And though I wanted to be an engineer, what came sort of landed in my lap very accidentally was I met an orthopedic surgeon. And his challenge to me for engineers to get involved in healthcare spoke to me at that moment when I didn’t know what I wanted to do other than get grades. And so I followed him and that led to a career in biomechanics.

Santosh Zachariah:
And then I became an academic at a university and I was doing biomechanics research, but I got bored in seven years, and what do I do next? And I like programming. So I was living in Seattle and I went next door to Microsoft, and I was beginning to get bored when my children were young and going to school. And I was volunteering a lot at this school that my kids went to and that I now teach at. And what spoke to me about the school was it didn’t have grades, which was very novel to me, which meant that as teachers, though most of the teachers at our school don’t articulate this in that way. You have to dig really deep into intrinsic motivation because you’ve taken away the common motivation in school, which is extrinsic. And your whole approach to how you teach is very implicitly like, how do I challenge students when I don’t have that carrot of grades? And that really excited me. And I basically drank the Kool Aid, I went back to university, I got a master’s in teaching, and I came back because I wanted to work in this environment where students were being challenged through intrinsic motivation to find their potential. And it’s worked for me for the last 15 years.

Santosh Zachariah:
So even though I say I get born every seven years, I’ve studied out.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Santosh, it sounds like you’ve been intrinsically motivated to stay and work in this area, which I think is fascinating. So I want to Talk more about this intrinsic motivation piece. Obviously, there’s a lot of research out there that talks about intrinsic motivation in education. And I’m really curious, from your perspective, how do you get students intrinsically motivated in your classroom? What are some of the strategies you use, particularly when you don’t have any grades? How do you assess students for where they’re at as well?

Santosh Zachariah:
That is hard. Being in a grade free school assessment is more feedback. And I say we’re a grade free school, but over time, grade like things have crept in and we’re not completely grade free. But you had a great episode where you did one of your. When you review them, right, you do two or three debrief episodes and then you do a debrief and you had one on feedback. I think it was the end of season, beginning of season nine. And I like that framing of feedback more than assessment. And so you tend to become more process oriented than product oriented because you want to give feedback during the process rather than at the end of the process where you evaluate the feedback.

Santosh Zachariah:
So it’s a different way and it is probably more time consuming. And being in an independent school with small class sizes is a huge, huge advantage there. You know your students individually and you can give them feedback in ways that challenge them. You challenge them to improve what you’re seeing. So it is the product, but you’re challenging them to go back and reiterate and improve and work on the reiteration is the process and you’re developing skill that way. It is also a more skill oriented approach than a content oriented approach. So mastery of skill rather than mastery of content.

Matthew Worwood:
I do want to go back to the second part of the question because it’s also in your story. I hate to stereotype, but I feel based on my experience in education that some of our best performing students are typically motivated. The extrinsic motivation is to maintain that good grade. And the idea of suddenly removing that and then them being challenged to say, okay, well, that was what was motivating me. To me, it’s a challenge. I’m sitting here and I’m thinking this could be difficult for some students to make that transition. Am I kind of overthinking? Is it or is it hard?

Santosh Zachariah:
I think it’s hard. I haven’t had to deal with that at this school because we have a low attrition rate, which means most of our students have been with since they were between four and six years old. So that is the only environment they know. If we get new students, it’s mainly at sixth grade. So they’re about 11 years old and they are coming in as a smaller, maybe less than a third, maybe a fourth of our class might be new, of our grade might be new in sixth grade. So they’re coming into an environment where the majority of people, majority of the students think one way and they have to adapt to it. I haven’t thought through what that process might be like for them. I do think through when our eighth graders go, we’re a K through eighth school or preschool through eight school.

Santosh Zachariah:
When our eighth graders go to high school, they encounter grades and it is a big shock. And it takes them a whole semester to figure that out. And that is a unsettling semester for a lot of our students because they went from a different mode of feedback to where they get summative assessments and they get grades and Those come to GPAs and that matters. But I find most of them figure it out in a semester. So if I reverse engineer that, I would say that I think maybe we should go back and look at our 6th graders and see what their first semester is like and what they struggle with. But it hasn’t bubbled up as something that we’ve had to consciously work on. Like when we bring new students in who’ve come from a grade oriented environment, how does that work for them?

Matthew Worwood:
But just to go back, it sounds like it’s a learned behavior, right? And of course that’s obvious. Do you think to a certain extent some of the challenges with grades is because of the emphasis we’ve put on them? So for example, you kind of alluded to the fact that you’ve had, even though you don’t have formal grades in the school, there’s still a need to establish some type of benchmark. Maybe it’s a case that that benchmark stays hidden. So we have a tool to measure progress and the outcomes of our learning. But the emphasis that we’re placing, and I’m going to say emphasis within our society, because I myself, as parents, I know, my wife and I, we say, oh, report card comes in, how did you do with your grades? And so you’re making me think that this learned behavior is something that we do at really early age. We make it all about the grades. And actually maybe it’s not that the grades are bad, it’s not that because we can talk a lot. Oh, grades are really bad.

Matthew Worwood:
They’re really bad. They serve a purpose. But maybe the emphasis that we place on them for the students, we might have emphasis on them, but the emphasis we place on them for the students. Maybe that’s more of the issue. And I just feel that that actually is something we probably could address in K through 12 education.

Santosh Zachariah:
I agree with you on that completely. Parents are very anxious and if you teach in an independent school like we do, it’s a much closer relationship. We see the anxiety very close up. And that’s most of our slide away from being totally grade free has been parents need to know where is my child at and how can I support them best? So we have standards, we have a curriculum map, we do assess students against those standards and we do maintain grade books as teachers. So you’re correct. It’s not a vacuum or it’s not free floating. But like you said, the emphasis in the conversation with the student is not how are you performing against this benchmark, but rather how are you growing towards something that you’re working towards. And so I completely agree with you on that.

Santosh Zachariah:
I want to add something more to that. Since the school was founded in 1963, so it’s been working on what it’s doing for a while. But during the entire time it has been a school for what we now call highly capable learners. Some people call them gifted, gifted and talented. So that’s a kind of entry threshold that students have to cross to get in. And I think, like you said, I don’t think intrinsic motivation is a trait. It can be learned. And I don’t think that every person responds equally.

Santosh Zachariah:
So in highly capable students, I think there are a group who are challenged externally, are competitive and want to do well and want to see how they match up against the best in their environment. And I think that there are some gifted and talented programs that work on speed on how fast can you get through the curriculum and move to the next grade and the next grade and get to university early. And I think that there are environments that work for them. Well, I think the type of student we get is not at least the way we select students or the way they grow up in our environment. It’s not about how fast can you get through the curriculum, but it’s like, how can you explore it? How can you go deep? How can you find your passions? How can you find your strengths? Our parent teacher conferences are student led from fourth or fifth grade. So within that we are in an environment where we have students who lean more towards being intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated. And the students who are naturally extrinsically motivated find it hard at our school.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Santosh, I just want to put this sort of into practice for the teachers listening. So I have a classroom. It’s not going to be grades based. I’ve got some students, I’m giving them some agency, I’m giving them choice. I’m allowing them to explore their interests. So what are some things that you do to intrinsically motivate students in your classroom, particularly when they are sitting in the corner saying, I don’t want to do this, like, what’s the point? How do you make it rich and engaging for them to get that intrinsic motivation?

Santosh Zachariah:
So since I began reading about creativity, which was about within the last three years, and that’s how I found your podcast and got so excited by it, one of the researchers who’s spoken most to me and I wish one day you will get her. I don’t know how to say her name, so forgive me. Theresa Amabile.

Cyndi Burnett:
Oh, she’s coming on this season.

Santosh Zachariah:
Ooh, wonderful, wonderful. I’m so excited.

Matthew Worwood:
Emails are being exchanged this week. Santosh.

Santosh Zachariah:
So Therese, did I say it correctly?

Cyndi Burnett:
Theresa Ameel Amabile.

Santosh Zachariah:
Amabile. Motivation is big for me. What resonates with me is motivation and intrinsic motivation and that the work has to be meaningful. And the way I translate what she’s doing with adults is students have to find the work meaningful to engage with it, which means that in what you ask them to do, you have to give them plenty of opportunity to find meaning, which means the task you’re asking them to do cannot be cookie cutter. If you ask them all to do the same thing, it’s hard for them to find meaning. Which means you’re giving them in our sort of education speak, you’re differentiating on how they show their learning, not only differentiate in how they approach the task, but give them plenty of choice in can I find something in this that is meaningful to me? And then we get engagement there. Which means that when you start assessing, it’s difficult as a teacher because you’re getting a lot of different product because you’re giving so much choice to the student in how do I connect with this in a way that I can actually start putting energy and effort into it and following up on that. If your approach as a teacher is more skill based than content based, it is easier to give feedback on skill than say, okay, you were good at this thing that you were trying to do rather than say, you have shown mastery of this particular piece of informational content.

Matthew Worwood:
To that point though, it goes back to what you said earlier about the process over the end product. We call it the product, the outcome. And you know, it’s a challenge for some teachers, right, because that requires you to, to a certain extent, conduct some observations that you might not normally do. You would have to go in and observe the process or be deliberate in making sure that the process can present itself to you. And that might be a shift for some teachers or some subjects. But I think to a certain extent, there are some skills, obviously particularly some of the soft skills as well, that emerge during the process that aren’t always readily available to see and grade in that final product. Do you have any ideas or thoughts about that predicament? Because I feel like some teachers, they love it, but it might be quite a drastic change for them.

Santosh Zachariah:
It is, it is. And it’s probably the biggest challenge to reframe it towards that orientation. I think that given time and interest, most teachers could do it. Because every teacher has their framework in which they see students and say, okay, this is how education works. But what I think is fairly universal is zpd zone of proximal development. We are always scaffolding and we are always saying, here’s where the person I’m interacting with is at. If you think of a staircase, here’s the height of the step that I think that they can negotiate, and how do I scaffold that process in a way that they’ll be successful? Because every teacher knows that if your child is not successful or your learner is not successful, you start losing them. So all the scaffolding we put in place is to make sure that they are successful in that step.

Santosh Zachariah:
They reach for in terms of effort or time or stamina or something. So we have that framework where everything we do is scaffolding. We’re scaffolding towards an outcome. The harder part, and it is a struggle for me. And when I’ve been thinking about creativity specifically and process of creativity, how do you scaffold process? What is a step when you think of process? Because when you think of product, you can say, the product is at these levels of the rubric, and you show this level of mastery in the rubric. But how do you break down process and then scaffold it and then be able to then reflect on it and say, okay, how did that process go? This goes back to creativity. Because I think that as teachers, if we’re trying to bring creativity into the classroom, if we cannot deconstruct process in a way that we can teach it, it’ll be hard because all we can teach is process. You can’t teach creativity as big C creativity we teach process and then wait to see what happens when we let the process just happen.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I think this process you’re referring to, Santosh, is really around metacognition and thinking about our thinking. And it’s interesting because we’re bringing Jo Bowler on also on this season of the podcast, and I’m reading her book, Mathisha, and she’s talking a lot about, thinking about and reflecting on our process of learning. And I think in terms of creativity. You know, as creativity practitioners, one of the first things I always have people do is think about the process that they use in whatever they’re doing. If it’s problem solving, which is typically what we teach in creative problem solving, you know, think about the last problem you solved and identify what steps you took in order to solve it. So even thinking about, thinking about how you learn, if you show a math problem thinking about, well, what steps did you take? And say those steps out loud to reflect on the process and to have students sharing that reflection of how they’re thinking about a problem out loud so other students can sort of see things in different perspectives. So I’m thinking about this book, Math Ish, and I’m thinking about how you can get students to do that in really any content area where you first identify, okay, when you learned this X, Y, and Z, and when you thought about this, how did you go about thinking? What helps you remember it? How can you, you know, so that you’re sharing in that learning experience and that thinking process that we go through. And I think metacognition is going to be so much more important, especially in the age of AI and having students think about how they acquire knowledge and what they do with it.

Santosh Zachariah:
I couldn’t agree more with that. I completely agree with that. Again, talking specifically about creativity, the most common definitions always come up with something like, it has to be novel. It has to be original. It has to be surprising. If it doesn’t have that, then it sort of fails the creativity test. That judgment is external. The person who is surprised says it’s creative, not the person who generated it.

Santosh Zachariah:
The person who generated it or transformed the idea is not saying that. I mean, they do feel that. But you’re waiting for an external judgment and going back to the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation things we were talking about, we have to be able to give our students the skill that metacognition skill of, I’m not judging your product to tell you whether they were creative or not. I’m trying to give you the skills for you to Be able to reflect on it and see. Be curious about what happened at what stage that led to this outcome. If we can stoke that curiosity. Especially younger students are very curious about information. When they’re really young, they want to know in the name of every dinosaur or every Star wars character, they’re curious about information.

Santosh Zachariah:
And we’re very good at stoking curiosity as teachers. I think that’s a superpower of ours. Can we stoke curiosity in where will this go? And in the context of creativity. I think imagination is something that as teachers, we haven’t had much training or practice at, but they deconstruct the process of imagination and then shepherd that and say, I wonder what will happen if I do this? And then let that process run out and then be able to reflect back and say, this is sort of why this happened or why I got here. And then next time around, again, be curious. And then you begin to form your own internal schema of how you are creative and when the sparks come and when to leverage that, of course, as you get much older. But I agree with you that the reflection on what steps you took and how those outcomes came. Take the skills we have in something like math or science and then map those to the.

Santosh Zachariah:
Those are all convergence skills. We are getting students to get to an outcome that we desire of them. Can we take our strengths, then move it to the divergence portion and say, when it comes to the imagination or it comes to the curiosity of where will this go? Can we take those metacognitive skills that we give our students and say, okay, you can also do it in this other side of the process where you’re in this broad, divergent phase before you start pruning and converging on solution.

Matthew Worwood:
Really, when we talk about mini C creativity, the idea of the individual making new discoveries and making new connections, the. That aligns with this idea of what sometimes researched around creative metacognition, because that is when you’re becoming aware that you are discovering something new. And I think it’s also a place where we can reflect. Have I deferred judgment or did I go on my first idea? Oh, I’m going on my first idea. Let me challenge myself, hit the pause button, defer judgment. I’m going to generate some other ideas. I’m going to engage my imagination. I’m going to use a strategy, a thinking strategy that was given to me to try and generate more ideas and then be aware of why you’re making the decisions that you’re making.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think there’s opportunities through journals or video blogs to get students engaging reflection to improve metacognition specific to the creative process and ultimately identify when we’re thinking critically and creatively when presented with a problem.

Santosh Zachariah:
Totally agree. And I as an adult and given my background, it’s much easier for me to see that in high school and college where it’s easier to have those sort of conversations. And the challenge I have now is how do I sort of, in a teacher sense, create a scope and sequence and work backwards and say, what does that sort of metacognition look like for a 10 year old or a 9 year old in the horizon of time that they can look back at and the language that they have to talk about it? But I do think that we can start giving our learners those skills much earlier than we do now. We don’t have to wait for high school to say, I can have a deep conversation with you about how this essay evolved from your starting idea to the choices you made to the final product and are you happy with it or where would you make changes if you did it again? I think we can move those steps earlier and as teachers, that’s a challenge. How do you take these things and start creating the foundations in younger children so that they are better placed to do that in high school, college, adult life?

Matthew Worwood:
Do you want to bring more creative and critical thinking into your school? Look no further than our podcast sponsor, Curiosity to Create.

Cyndi Burnett:
Curiosity to Create is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging professional development for school districts and empowering educators through online courses and personal coaching.

Matthew Worwood:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their creative thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community, all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So Santosh, when we met you in Seattle, you told us that you have listened to almost every episode of the Feeling, Creativity and Education podcast. So we have to know what was your favorite episode and why?

Santosh Zachariah:
The episode that really jumps out to me as it I just sat up and said I have to listen to this. I have to take notes. I have to really think this through. Was Heather Lyon’s episode and Engagement. The way she framed engagement and she gave the two axes and said, okay, your activities can be compliant or non compliant and you can be interested or absorbed. That gave me a framework that really resonated the way I see learning and now thinking Back to our earlier conversation. It’s so much about meaning and that your engagement comes from finding a hook in this activity that you can connect with. So I felt there were lots of practical things to the way Heather phrase that that I could use.

Santosh Zachariah:
So much so that I actually went back and I did a bunch of Googling. I downloaded a bunch of her other stuff on the web and I subscribed to her newsletter now. And so I’ve become a fan of Heather because I guess engagement is something as a teacher I struggle with or I feel I struggle with. And if someone gives me tools there, it’s a big step forward for me.

Matthew Worwood::
I think if I remember it rightly, compliance is not engagement. It kind of goes back to the conversation we had early. You could have students who look really engaged, but they’ve got that extrinsic motivation to get the A and they’re actually just complying in order to satisfy the system and the culture that exists in the classroom, and they’re not actually engaged. So I think it makes perfect sense that that is one of your favorite episodes given the conversation that we’ve just had.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Santosh, one more question for you. So this is a new question that we brought into season 10 because we’re using the first hundred and plus interviews for our first book. So this one will go to our second book at some point. And the question is, what was your most creative educational experience and why? It can be informal or formal. It could be where you were the teacher or where you were the student. So what would you say is your most creative educational experience?

Santosh Zachariah:
So I’ll give you one second. As soon as you gave me that question, the one that came to mind was the pandemic. And it was an absolute explosion of creativity by teachers to solve problems that landed in their lap. And it was like the equivalent of being on stage. The curtain opens, you have to have a lesson. It’s on zoom. It’s in some weird way, but you have to have a lesson and you have a. A bunch of students and you don’t know whether their video is working, their audio’s working, they’re engaged.

Santosh Zachariah:
And it was. Everyone was back at your years of experience as teaching really didn’t count for anything. Everyone was on the same page and you just had to figure it out. I’m not going to go into that because I think Matt did an excellent outside of the podcast, Matt did an excellent review of that. Was it a video you did, Matt, where you got a bunch of teachers together?

Matthew Worwood:
I appreciate the shout out it was called teaching during the Pandemic. And it was a roundtable with teachers specifically because I agree, Santosh, I wanted to capture all of the amazing things that they were doing.

Santosh Zachariah:
Yeah. So that was when I felt the most intense creativity. But then when I thought more, I went back to a professional development experience I had nine years ago. And so I’ve been teaching for 15 years. And so I was sort of past the five year mark and beginning to feel like, okay, I might have a career in this. I could be better than bad at this. So I was at the right moment in my career. And I was a middle school science teacher teaching 8th grade science.

Santosh Zachariah:
So physics, which is in terms of the subject that evokes my passion the most, it was physics. And I got this opportunity to go to a professional development in Western Kentucky University, and it’s now called the STEM Scholar Program. They bring 10 middle school science teachers in for one week, but just put them together and do PD on teaching science of middle school teachers. And this was the first cohort, I think, and there were 10 of us. The Western Kentucky University has a teacher education program and they also have, I guess it’s like you could call it a lab school. It’s called the Gatton Academy. It’s for juniors and seniors going in high school students. It’s residential.

Santosh Zachariah:
It’s for gifted and talented students. And so the two teachers we had, Rico Tyler and Kerry McDaniels, they put together this amazing one week professional development for middle school science teachers, which is better than anything I’ve ever done in the past and I’ve done since then. I think teachers always complain how bad our PD is, which is funny because we’re teachers. We should be able to do good pd. And it was just that Rico and Kerry seem to have deconstructed how do you teach teachers and how do you find meaning? How do you find connection? How do you find engagement? And I went back just to make sure I have some of the facts right. And I found this video of Rico that I haven’t seen in nine years. And the first words he says, we want to nurture creativity in our middle school science teachers. And I just felt like I had never seen that experience in the framework of creativity.

Santosh Zachariah:
But that’s what they were trying to do. They were trying to foster creativity in middle school science teachers. They’ve been doing it successfully. Now I think this is their ninth or tenth cohort.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, Santosh, thank you so much for joining us today. Unfortunately, our time is up, but we really appreciate you being a listener on the show and reaching out to us and just sharing what’s happening inside the classrooms. Because our goal for this podcast, as you know, is to bridge that gap between what’s happening in research and practice and in the classroom. So thank you for joining us today, and thank you for sharing your insights.

Matthew Worwood:
If you like this episode particularly, perhaps you’re interested in sharing ideas around metacognition around your school, or perhaps initiating a discussion around the emphasis placed on grades in your school, then we think this episode will be a great episode for you to share with your administrators and colleagues. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. You’ve been listening to the Fueling Creativity and Education podcast, hosted by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our creative producer is Catherine Fu. Our editor is Sam Atkins. And this episode was made possible thanks to our sponsor, Curiosity to create.