Kind of both. Is a pool like a group or what? And yes i am trying to set up workers or figure out how it works. What I am trying to do is see it from the server side a little bit to better mine.
Yes. Pool operators create the back and front-end for many miners to join the pool to combine their power to mine a block together. The Pool will send you a work to solve and once it is solved, your miner will send the solution (proof of work) back to the pool to indicate that you are contributing. Once someone solves a block, everyone will then be paid for the amount of work they have contributed. The more hashpower the pool has, the faster it will solve blocks. It is pretty hard to solve blocks without ASIC headwares or rather, a farm of them. There are various payment schemes for pools, all of them here
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools. The most common one is PPLNS, it is the most effective at stopping pool hoppers. Setting up a pool isn't easy since everything need to be audited and designed well to attract users.