This paper describes how Clive School, a small rural K-9 school in Alberta (Canada), used a team teaching approach and the best practices of staff development to facilitate the inclusion of special needs students into general education classrooms. Since September 1989, the staff at Clive School have been involved in developing their school into a Cooperative Learning Demonstration School. In contrast to the traditional special education pull-out program, cooperative learning (CL) involves co-teaching partnerships between the classroom and the resource specialist teacher. In June 1990, the school received a 2-year grant to provide CL training, technical assistance, and consulting services to the Clive school staff; identify key tools, strategies, and ideas that empowered staff at Clive school; and create a videotape explaining the project. Following a half-day CL inservice, teachers decided to focus on CL as the primary professional development project for the next 2 years. Specifically, the 2-year project aimed to help teachers understand distinctions among competitive, individualistic, and cooperative goal structures, as well as the five basic elements of social learning. During this period, teachers developed a team action plan describing how CL would be implemented based on the best practices of staff development, implemented CL in their classrooms, formed peer coaching relationships to help each other learn CL teaching strategies, and elected to become an Alberta CL demonstration program so that other teachers could observe CL strategies in the classroom. (LP)