The educational literature provides a roadmap for instructors and institutions that want to close equity gaps in coursework pass rates and degree outcomes for underrepresented minority (URM) students which include students who identify as Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American. It is to transition teaching methods from Transmission, telling students how to do things, to Inquiry, which has been shown to improve teaching and learning outcomes by incorporating students' prior knowledge, ideas, and life experiences into the learning process, including unique questions, backgrounds, and connections they make to course content. In contrast to Inquiry, the ubiquitous Transmission method is mainly relied upon by instructors teaching large, gateway undergraduate engineering courses where the instructor is the keeper of the static knowledge that matters to students and students report they rely on their instructors to learn and are not developing their own learning methods and expertise. Inquiry encourages students to engage, identify their questions and misconceptions, design experiments and use evidence in the process of improving their understanding. By adopting Inquiry as the primary teaching method in engineering, instructors facilitate and guide students in the learning process, clarifying student prior knowledge, incorporating student questions and misconceptions, and eliciting student ideas about how they learn. This paper presents findings from the research partnership between a psychometrician and curriculum advisor and two faculty members of Computer Science and Engineering in a Californian institution of higher education. The partners met weekly over the course of 2021-2022 academic year to explore and refine their understandings of what it means to teach and assess with Inquiry, and develop practical examples to demonstrate Inquiry teaching as applied to engineering content. These meetings included unpacking the data and evidence surrounding equity gaps, exploring methods in the literature that closes them, and innovating practical examples of Inquiry applied to engineering content to illustrate pre- and post-teaching activities, before and after the transition to Inquiry. This work allowed for designing and testing the Inquiry Teaching and Learning (ITL) method and framework that specifically addresses challenges engineering instructors face when teaching and offers a suggested pathway forward for faculty and programs intending to transition from Transmission to Inquiry teaching, improve student learning to better resemble the thinking and work of engineers, and reduce persistent and historic equity gaps in engineering education. Using institutional outcomes and pass rate data from our large, high stakes, foundational computer science course, CSE 12, Computer Systems and Assembly Language, the efficacy of ITL for improving student achievement was measured by comparing results to previous course offerings before this pedagogical transition. The data analysis and course outcomes comparison suggest a significant reduction in the equity gap between URM and non-URM students because of the transition to Inquiry. We present the evidence of this and propose Inquiry and the ITL framework as what is needed to foster a new teaching mindset for faculty, undergraduate tutors, and teaching assistants that will improve student learning and close equity gaps between student subgroup populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]