Ms. Zager is an attorney in private practice in Seattle and surrounding areas not quite believing she is no longer the Legal Director at Student Advocacy and no longer represents children and families in New York’s family courts. She is admitted to the Bars of both New York and Washington State. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest, she has learned how differently different states interpret federal law and regulations, how “common sense” is common only within a certain community of participants, speakers, or believers, and how little we really listen to each other and understand what in the world we are being told. She is a trained mediator and collaborative lawyer and also spent two years working as a chaplain on multi-disciplinary hospital teams facilitating family meetings and working individually with patients and staff.
She will talk about the core values required by early conflict resolution. A paradigm shift is necessary to move from adversarial meetings to collaborative and durable agreements. But this shift takes more than isolated conflict resolution skills and good will. Each stakeholder needs to learn significant listening skills and the ability to use them in highly emotional situations. The key to learning how to do this well is having the training opportunity to listen without needing to diagnose and prescribe or keep to a budget or even a meeting schedule. In addition, in order to be most effective, participants need to have had the experience of deep listening followed by reflection on the story being heard. This work is not simply for school personnel; it is also important for families to be able to hear the powers, obligations and limitations of schools.
She has suggestions for how multi-disciplinary training programs can work, each of which is challenged by Ms. Blumenreich.
Ms. Zager will also address the legal and ethical challenges faced by lawyers and advocates who work in early stage conflict resolution and how sensitivity to these issues on both the side of the advocate and school personnel is critical.