Creating teaching strategies to engage students at various levels of intellectual development is one of the significant challenges facing faculty. This challenge becomes more pronounced in the online realm as the amount of time faculty have with students is limited, there is a lack of face-to-face interaction, and many students have many other pressing concerns to handle. Trying to teach to every student, however, is a worthwhile endeavor despite, or perhaps, because of the challenges. As Dewey (1916) opined, "Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with operation factors which have tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another" (p. 100).

One of the primary fears I have in functioning in my classrooms is I spend an inordinate amount of time with students who are struggling with the material, often at the expense of the students who are excelling and needing new and more engaging challenges. I believe this holds true for faculty regardless of whether they teach lower division, upper division, or graduate level courses. Although it is certainly worth the faculty's time to help develop the intellectual abilities of their students who are struggling, there is also a pertinent need to engage students who are thriving and wanting and needing weightier intellectual endeavors as faculty should not sacrifice the learning opportunities of high performing students to focus solely on helping struggling students.

One possible solution is to integrate "stretch posts" to ensure that thriving students receive the type of attention they need and deserve. The concept behind stretch posts is analogous to the idea of stretch goals as the purpose behind both is to challenge individuals to reach beyond their current abilities. Stretch posts are not designed to generate beaucoup responses within the discussion forum, as many students will not comprehend the content within the posts, rather they are designed to pique the interest of a few thriving students to enhance their experience in the class as well as engage them on a higher intellectual level. In addition, these stretch posts can help faculty use their finite time efficiently as these posts encourage thriving students to explore independently the content in-depth and synthesize their research with content covered in the general course material. Using terms such as explore, integrate, connect, resolve, and other  verbs are central in the creation of stretch posts as we seek to push thriving students to delve into their heretofore unrecognized abilities.

Although stretch posts are far from a panacea regarding the desire to engage each student at their intellectual level, they can help faculty engage fully their thriving students with efficiency leaving more time to help their struggling students.  

Thanks,

Eric

Reference

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.