A hush falls over the fifth-grade classroom at State Street Elementary School, in Westerly. Steve Morrone has handed out a sheet with today’s math problem and lets the kids know he’s ready to start. “Read the problem to yourself, think about it, and turn the paper over. Then visualize what’s happening. Direct the movie of the problem in your head.”

Kids highlight important bits of information in a scenario about a family trip to the Washington Monument, with its 50 flags representing each state. Using a certain process for solving problems, Morrone’s students first need to find the total number of stars on the 50 flags. And they must develop a “rule,” an algebraic equation, for determining the total number of stars in the event that the U.S. adds more states.

After a silence Marrone asks what the kids saw in their heads. Many remember places with lots of flags — New York City’s Rockefeller Center, the Rhode Island State House. Marrone makes a gratified fuss over the kids’ good thinking.

Morrone is both the special-education resource teacher for grades 4 and 5 and the “focus leader” in math for the whole school. Two other teachers lead the focus in reading and writing. Each leader has a “focus team” with one teacher from each grade level. (The school has roughly three classes per grade.) These three teams are charged with figuring out how to improve academics throughout the school.

The principal, Victor Ventura, introduced me to the math focus team and then left me and them to go about our business. His job is to facilitate their work, figure out how to get them what they need, and hold them accountable. This is the opposite of a top-down organization. The Westerly School Department does not dictate what professional development the teachers need. Neither does the principal. That’s up to the teachers.

Which is as it should be. Teachers should never waste everyone’s time and resources implementing programs they do not think will work. When programs are thrust on unwilling teachers, they shrug away failure with “Hey, it wasn’t my idea.”

Heavy-handed top-down management is a drag. Teachers, all professionals, resent it. And it gets crummy results.

So, four times a year Ventura gets substitute teachers to cover each team’s classes, to free them up to spend a day “focusing” on learning something new together. On the focus day they’ll also sift through data to see how they’re doing and to identify problems and weaknesses that need addressing.

In previous focus meetings, the math group realized that every teacher teaches a different process for solving math problems. If the whole school uses the same one, the kids can build on what they already know, instead of starting over each year. The group shopped different problem-solving protocols and chose this four-step process. Marrone learned how to use it so he could demonstrate how it works in a class and help teachers if they have problems using it. From now on, when a teacher asks the children to become the “director,” which is step one of this process, they all will know to stop for a moment, become the director of the movie of the problem in their heads, visualizing each of its elements.

After any focus day, the teachers on that team — reading, writing or math — go back to their grade-level common planning time to teach their colleagues what they’ve learned. Each teacher on the math focus team is her grade-level’s leader in math.

So, for example, Marrone must have said at least 20 times, “Fifty what? States? Flags? Stars? Twenty-five hundred what? Numbers are adjectives. We need to have a noun to know the meaning of the number.” First-, second- and third-grade teachers could see for themselves that they need to get the kids into the habit of labeling numbers early on. They’ll make this point to their grade-level colleagues.

With every teacher on one of the teams, all teachers are leaders at their grade level. This is an excellent use of the school’s resources.

I’m impressed by how many very different strategies can forward the work of school improvement, and in dramatic ways. (Think: Learning Walks, Formative Assessments, this “focus” strategy.) But what they all have in common is that they are teacher-driven, pulling whole faculties into the work of school improvement. A good strategy stokes teachers’ ambitions by giving them the power to make decisions about how to teach, how to meet the standards and what they need for their own professional development. Empowering teachers engages them in the challenge of making their own school work.

In the last three years, State Street Elementary has made big academic gains. Since the focus teams began in 2005-2006, 21 percent more students are proficient in math, as of the last round of testing. Also, 10 percent more in reading and 20 percent more in writing. Those increases pulled the school’s percentage of proficient students up from just below the state average, in math and writing, to well above.

By all accounts “focus” is working just great.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.