Jean Sunde Peterson

Jean Sunde Peterson, Ph.D., professor emerita and former director of school counselor preparation at Purdue University, was a classroom and gifted-education teacher for many years and was involved in teacher education prior to graduate work in counseling at The University of Iowa. A licensed mental health counselor with considerable clinical experience with gifted youth and their families, she is a veteran conference presenter and conducts school-based workshops on social and emotional development of high-ability students, academic underachievement, bullying, parenting gifted children and adolescents, cultural values as related to identification of and programming for gifted youth, and prevention-oriented affective curriculum—most of these related to her practice-oriented research.  She is author of Gifted at Risk: Poetic Profiles and The Essential Guide to Talking with Gifted Teens and is co-editor of Models of Counseling Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults, among over 100 journal articles, books, and invited chapters. She is a former chair of the Counseling and Guidance Network and also served two terms on the NAGC Board of Directors.

Speaker Topics:

• Social and emotional development of gifted children and teens
• Academic underachievement:  Addressing it with new language, perspectives, and approaches
• Gifted kids and trauma, bullying, change, loss
• Parenting gifted children and adolescents
• Affective curriculum—separate or embedded in core curriculum
• Differentiating counseling for gifted youth: why and how
• Listening and responding skills for parents and teachers
• The asset-burden paradox of giftedness