By MARTY LEVINE
When kids are sitting in the hallway at Falk Laboratory School, they’re not at detention, they’re working on their own projects — or even playing.
When they are taking apart their playground equipment and putting it back together in new ways, it’s because the equipment was designed for that.
And when the older students are in the younger classrooms, they’re not being held back — they are spending time with the newbies to understand how these younger Falk students learn and dream and what is the best present the older kids can create, right there at Falk, to help the next group play and learn.
Falk Laboratory School, a K-8 facility at the top of Pitt’s campus since 1931, has its own outdoor classrooms, a gym on its roof with an expansive view of Oakland, and art everywhere. It is a different kind of school indeed (hence the “laboratory” label), with new teaching methods long the focus, teacher training opportunities for School of Education students, and research ongoing toward best classroom practices.
From the rooftop gym — part of the school’s new addition from 2009, used for everything from soccer to yoga — Jill Sarada, director of the school, and Adam Reger, communications coordinator, point out the sights. Below us is the Cathedral of Learning and the rest of Pitt, while beside and above are the green rooftop of the rest of the addition, as well as three playgrounds and a path between them leading to a forested fragment of hillside dubbed Falk Woods, which doubles as the school’s outdoor classroom.
One of these playgrounds is very different from the others. The first has swings; the second is a Pitt court area for basketball and other sports; but the third looks like any number of children’s construction toys — from building blocks to Legos — come alive.
This is the Anji Play equipment, which arrived at Falk in 2023 thanks to the previous year’s Pitt Day of Giving campaign. The Anji materials include mattress-like mats, planks, wide ladders that resemble the bottoms of beach lifeguard chairs, tubes and boxes with a variety of cutout shapes on their sides, all in a variety of colors. Kids are hauling and rolling them together and piling them up and inserting them into each other to create a variety of objects to explore.
The kids are “defining the play for themselves,” Sarada points out, “building a skill set that mentally grows, so kids can think for themselves: What is the right material ... to solve this problem?”
In fact the entirety of Falk feels like a makerspace. Inside, at a table in one corner of the hallway, three kids in the school’s middle grades are sitting quietly together, working on cracking a code, while right next door the school’s WonderLab is alive with chatter and clatter.
At this moment the seventh-grade woodworking club is finishing up making the last of somewhat mysterious creations for the kindergarteners (involving mallets and a child’s version of a bow and arrow set, made from scrap materials). These seventh graders had earlier visited the kindergarten classroom, watched the youngsters at play and even played with them to determine what sorts of activities might suit them — and what they might genuinely enjoy.
“Wonder, care and act” is the school’s philosophy, Sarada pointed out: Devised by school personnel in 2018, it stands for observing how the world can be improved and then caring enough to devise and undertake a plan of action.
All of that has resulted in the current sounds of hammering and lots of laughter.
This is not the first year such a project has been undertaken, and “the teachers told us the other day that it has changed their philosophy of play completely,” said one of the WonderLab co-instructors, Tim Wagner.
The idea of these projects is not only to build STEM skills, said the other, Derek Werderitch, but to connect students to the history and cultures related to their project, to get them addressing “What is the name for that thing” and “Where in the world has this happened?”
The whole school is, in a sense, a WonderLab, with Sarada and the school’s research coordinator (a faculty member in the education school’s Department of Teaching, Learning and Leading) working recently to increase teacher-led research and collaborations between Falk faculty and Pitt colleagues. Visiting researchers may submit proposals to the faculty and staff via the school’s website. Sarada pointed to recent work here on whether grouping students by gender improves their performance more or less than does grouping them by interest.
The only placid spot in the school, on this next-to-last day of classes before the summer, is the library, which has its own great view of Oakland outside a quirky yet intimate reading space in one corner, which also has a side view of yet another playground — this one for the kindergartners.
The library is also decorated with stained glass, a large animal puppet and artwork made and donated by past classes — a school tradition. Just outside the library, one unique classroom, with bleacher-like seating and a large mosaic on one side, uses the space under the interior steps of the new addition, which abuts a formerly exterior wall of the 1931 building.
The original building features a new auditorium donated by local movie director Rob Marshall and his two siblings — all Falk alumni. Outside, each step leading down to the playgrounds has a mosaic of poetry — a present from last year's class. This path leads down past the Pitt courts, with student-made stilts leaning against its entrance, and finally to Falk Woods.
Just the day before, groups of students had held story time in a clearing along the woods’ trail, used all year round (except when it is too muddy, Sarada said). Hawks and snakes will make an appearance here, and “students have an opportunity to see the life cycle” of flora and fauna, she said. They help to maintain and improve the trail while learning to identify plants and to plant native species to support the wildlife here.
Have we mentioned that there are classrooms at Falk too? They are the busiest-looking, most colorful classrooms ever, it seems — even empty.
At the end of Falk’s upper hall sits a lone student working at a large table, next to an array of puppets built atop backpacks by the puppet dance club. Students wearing these creations have performed all over the city, but now the puppets, and the lone student, are quiet. Summer is about to arrive. We suspect the next day, when school lets out, will still be the noisiest day of all — even here.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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