SPEAKERS/INSTRUCTORS

The gifted education professionals who participate in PG Retreat share presentations that are lively and interactive. They know many of us and we know them, or have been eager to meet them. Roundtables and more casual conversations over lunch, on a bench beside a path, or in a hallway provide opportunities for us to ask questions, chuckle over anecdotes, and experience their wisdom and guidance in a direct, personal way.

The following speakers will present programs and facilitated discussions at PG Retreat 2008.

Edward R. Amend, Psy.D., is a Clinical Psychologist at Amend Psychological Services, P.S.C., his private practice in Lexington, Kentucky, where he focuses on the social, emotional, and educational needs of gifted and talented youth and their families. Dr. Amend provides evaluations and therapy for a variety of special needs populations, including gifted children and adolescents, children with learning disabilities and attention disorders, and twice-exceptional children. He facilitates both child and parent discussion and education groups and offers consultation and training for school personnel. He is a frequent presenter at state and national conferences. He addresses issues including Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Asperger's Disorder, and other common misdiagnoses, as well as underachievement, perfectionism, educational planning, and social/emotional needs of gifted. Dr. Amend completed his doctoral training at the Wright State University School of Professional Psychology in Dayton, Ohio, where he worked under the supervision of Dr. James Webb. Dr. Amend currently resides in Lexington, Kentucky with his wife and two children.

Michele Kane, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Master of Arts in Gifted Education Program at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Michele is also is the President-Elect of the Illinois Association for Gifted Children and the Chair-Elect of the Global Awareness Network of the National Association for Gifted Children. A major focus of Michele's work is related to the social/emotional needs of the gifted. Along with her husband Dan, she is the parent of six gifted adult children.

Alexandra "Allie" Golon is a Master Teacher at Rocky Mountain School for the Gifted and Creative in Boulder, Colorado. As the former director of the Visual-Spatial Resource, a G/T teacher, and parent to two gifted visual-spatial learners, Allie brings a wealth of experience to her books, Raising Topsy-Turvy Kids: Successfully Parenting Your Visual-Spatial Child; If You Could See the Way I Think: A Handbook for Visual-Spatial Kids; and The Visual-Spatial Classroom. Her latest release, Visual-Spatial Learners: Differentiation Strategies for Creating a Successful Classroom, is a rich source of classroom strategies that will help every student succeed, regardless of preferred learning style. Allie has been invited to present on teaching and parenting visual-spatial learners at state, national and international venues. She has appeared on talk radio programs and in various print media and her articles can be found in a variety of journals and magazines. For more information, please visit Allie's Web site.

Barbara Mitchell Hutton is co-founder of Rocky Mountain School for the Gifted and Creative and serves as President of the Board of Directors. She has presented at the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) annual conferences in Tampa, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Denver as well as at the Hollingworth Center for the Highly Gifted conference in Boston. Other national presentations include the SENG (Supporting the Social and Emotional Needs of the Gifted) in St. Paul and the New England Conference for Gifted and Talented Educators in Massachusetts.

Barbara has made local presentations at the Colorado Association for the Gifted and Talented Annual Conference, the Beyond Giftedness conference and the Intensitivities 25th Anniversary Conference of the Gifted Development Center. She is co-chair of the Global Awareness Network of NAGC and active in the Special Schools Network. In 2005, Barbara was an education delegate to the People's Republic of China where she presented a session on asynchronous development at the Beijing Gifted Education Institute. Barbara has written articles about gifted children, parenting and education models for gifted schools that have appeared in national journals and local newspapers. Barbara holds an undergraduate degree in Sociology and Social Work from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from the University of Northern Colorado.

Prof. Patricia Purdue, Ph.D. The early years of Dr. Purdue's education took place in Illinois, Ohio, and Tennessee. At Bryn Mawr College, she graduated summa cum laude with Honors in both her majors, mathematics and physics. She also completed a master's degree in mathematics during her four years at Bryn Mawr. Dr. Purdue then earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) under the direction of Dr. Kip Thorne, a prominent authority on gravitational waves and the general theory of relativity. She is now a member of the faculty at Colorado College, where she was recently promoted to Associate Professor.

Annette Sheely is currently the school counselor at the Rocky Mountain School for the Gifted and Creative (RMS) in Boulder, Colorado. RMS is very familiar with children in the highly, exceptionally, and profoundly gifted IQ ranges. Prior to that she worked for several years at the Gifted Development Center, assessing and counseling gifted children and adults. For a number of years, Annette served as the Gifted Children's Resource Coordinator for Denver Mensa and she was on the advisory board of the National Gifted Children's Fund. Annette has written articles for journals and newsletters in the field of giftedness and has spoken at numerous national and local conferences about the gifted. She also wrote the forward and two chapters in the book, High IQ Kids, a book about profoundly gifted children, published in 2007 by Free Spirit Publishing. Annette earned her M.A. in Clinical Psychology (with an emphasis in marriage and family counseling) from Pepperdine University.

Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist. She directs the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, and its subsidiary, the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado. Over 5,400 children have been assessed at the Gifted Development Center in the last 29 years. She also founded Visual-Spatial Resource. Her Ph.D. is in educational psychology and special education from the University of Southern California. For nine years, she served on the faculty of the University of Denver in counseling psychology and gifted education. She co-chairs the NAGC Task Force on Assessment. She has been studying the psychology and education of the gifted since 1961 and has written over 300 articles, chapters and books in gifted education, including Counseling the Gifted and Talented, Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner, and Advanced Development: A Collection of Works on Gifted Adults.

Dan Tichenor has had an affinity for nature ever since he and his buddies would spend hours on end at Motlong's Pond. He has had experiences as a journalist, editor, storyteller, teacher of students with special needs and gifted students, as well those of a dad of six gifted (now adult) kids. He has been active in summer programs for gifted kids including those at a private school for gifted, a college program for gifted kids, and Yunasa camp for the highly gifted. Dan is a firm believer in the notion of "taking it outside" and his activities are firmly rooted in being outdoors and in learning from the environment.

Catherine Zakoian earned her masters degree in counseling psychology from the University of Colorado at Denver and her undergraduate degree in art from Cornell College. Catherine is in private practice as a child and family therapist in the Boulder and Vail, Colorado communities. She has worked as an elementary school art educator, develops and teaches undergraduate psychology coursework and works as an early childhood education consultant. Catherine has worked as a clinician on the child, family and adult outpatient teams at a regional mental health center as well as in production and human resource management for creative businesses.

Archive: See also our Speakers from PG Retreat 2007.