Teaching strategies that promote cooperative learning within heterogeneous, small groups of students, can be effective ways to deal with mainstreamed students in content area instruction. Cooperative learning not only develops academic competencies, but promotes positive peer relationships. To set the stage for cooperative learning, students must become familiar with rules pertaining to individual behavior in small group settings. Five instructional strategies are discussed: (1) the jigsaw, in which students learn a task and then teach it to others; (2) list-group-label, in which students focus on interrelationships of concepts and words; (3) small-group structured overviews, in which students work together to complete missing parts of a partially completed hierarchical schema; (4) survey, predict, read, and revise, in which students brainstorm, predict and revise responses regarding assigned reading; and (5) translation writing, in which group members construct for themselves an abstract of the textbook written in their own words. (CL)