GAEL UnscriptED S2:E18 | From Standards To Student Impact

Your ELA standards aren’t “new” anymore, but the way they show up in classrooms still depends on leadership choices made every week. We sit down with Georgia DOE leaders Amy Denty and April Aldridge (with support from Dr. Sarah Welch in the chat) to get brutally practical about how to move from page to practice with Georgia’s Now ELA Standards.We dig into the alignment advantage and the four levers leaders juggle every day: standards, curriculum, time, and support. Then we walk through the three drivers of instructional alignment that keep the gears turning: clarity, coherence, and consistency. That means knowing what the standards actually require, using learning progressions to strengthen vertical alignment, and understanding today’s broader definition of “text” including digital, visual, auditory, spoken, and multimodal texts. We also talk about why situating text by author, audience, purpose, and context changes the quality of student thinking.From there, we move into the hard part: checking alignment between standards, high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), and real classroom tasks. You’ll hear what to watch for during learning walks, how to avoid over-scaffolding that lowers rigor, and why “engagement” can’t replace cognitive demand. We break down an eight-step planning process for PLCs that helps teams identify priority standards, deconstruct expectations into skills, write transferable learning targets and success criteria, align assessments, and fill curriculum gaps consistently without burning teachers out.Subscribe for the rest of the series, share this with an instructional leader who owns the schedule and the PLC agenda, and leave a review if it helps. What’s one alignment move you’ll try this week?Please note: this is Session #1 of the 2026 GAEL Spring Webinar Series.