Reengineering an "Introduction to computing" course within a college-wide community of practice

Widening Implementation and Demonstration of Evidence Based Reforms (WIDER) is a campus-wide, NSF-funded effort to create institutional change in the way we teach core gateway STEM courses. While instruction and course reform has historically been attempted by lone rangers to little lasting effect, WIDER's paradigm is to organize instructors into Communities of Practice (CoPs) to provide mutual support and training, and to encourage and facilitate the organic dissemination of best practices across courses among the members of the community of practice. In particular, mentorship relationships within the community have provided ready avenues for the translation of best practices. In this paper, we describe and analyze the redesign of one such course in the WIDER community, highlighting how the redesign of this course was informed by its involvement within this larger community of practice.