Even though much has been written about cooperative learning in recent years, busy high school teachers contending with heavy curricular and teaching demands might not know much about the instructional method. Equipped with only a partial understanding of cooperative learning, some teachers may view it as a series of forced artificial constructs while others may view it as simply separating students into groups for an activity. To help high school science teachers make sense of the extensive cooperative learning research over the last two decades, this article summarizes the major ideas behind the cooperative learning teaching model, provides educational research evidence that supports the use of cooperative methods in promoting higher student learning outcomes and outlines three cooperative learning strategies that can be applied to any science content area. (Contains 2 figures.)