How to manage and orient teaching and learning in educational institutions to which students attend with such different motivations, levels of performance and characteristics, and how to help them achieve a significant amount of progress, despite the diversity? This is a question for which there have been few answers, although attention to that diversity has become a challenge to teachers and government agencies alike. The article contains several proposals on principles of cooperation as an organizational basis for institutional development, and cooperative learning as a teaching strategy that responds to this problem and, based on a concept of the class, to optimize learning and to improve the quality of education, so that the agents of the organization assume roles that are different from those in the traditional approach.