This interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty from the UTEP Colleges of Science, Engineering, and Education builds on the current MSEIP program Developing Metacognitive Learners to Persist and Achieve Timely Completion of Engineering, to increase its impact at UTEP. The project aims to provide a model for transforming first-year "gatekeeping" courses to "gateway" courses through the development of student learning communities by integrating cooperative learning and metacognitive strategies into pre-calculus workshops, where students become producers and disseminators of knowledge rather than solely consumers of knowledge.