The “d” in the Peterson Proactive Developmental Attention (PPDA) model: A lens for understanding and supporting underachievers

ABSTRACT

The Peterson Proactive Developmental Attention model (PPDA) offers a framework for understanding and addressing social and emotional concerns of high-ability students. This manuscript focuses on the developmental component, with emphasis on academic underachievement, with explanations and guidance for applying the developmental aspect of the PPDA model in school programs for bright students, in counseling, and at home. This article explores how an emphasis on the development of underachievers, in contrast with underachievement, can engage them and the adults who are invested in them in mutual learning about life in the present – for the sake of both present and future wellbeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Social and emotional development
• high-ability, underachievement
• The Peterson Proactive Developmental Attention Model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean Peterson

Jean Sunde Peterson, professor emerita, Purdue University, has focused most of her clinical work and scholarship on gifted youth, often exploring longitudinally the development of those who do not fit common stereotypes. For her typically cross-disciplinary work in counseling and gifted education, she has received 10 national awards and 12 at Purdue for teaching, or service. Among her nine books and 100 refereed articles and invited book chapters are at Risk: Poetic Profiles, The Essential Guide to Talking With Gifted Teens, and Gifted Students: A Guide for School Counselors. Her first career was in K–12 education.

Enyi Jen

Enyi Jen is a faculty at Bridges Graduate School of Cognitive Diversity in Education and a lecturer at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Prior to her doctoral studies at Purdue, she taught affective curriculum in a self-contained gifted high school STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program in Taiwan. She provides professional development, and advocates for the social and emotional well-being of gifted students and twice-exceptional students internationally. Her research interests include talent development, social and emotional development, twice-exceptional, qualitative methods, design-based research (DBR), and program evaluation.