A colleague and I have been working over 7 years with 150 UK secondary schools developing new software tools to support action research by individual teachers into factors that impact on the relationship between teaching and learning for different groups of learners.
This approach uses 'Within School Varaition' as its focus, a subject investigated by the National College for School Leadership over a two year period.
There is good evidence that this aproach is effective in raising school standards.
Schools using this approach have had improved school inspection results.
The best evidence is the many comments from headteachers and senior school leaders which can be seen at www.4matrix.org/comments
The website www.4matrix.org provides more details of this project.