Assessing Online Writing Professional Development with Video-Based Simulations

Persistent disparities in literacy outcomes affect deaf learners, who may experience writing instruction that does not align with their linguistic contexts. This study examined how teachers’ instructional reasoning about writing developed during participation in an online Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) professional development (PD) program. Nineteen teachers of deaf students completed a 30-hour virtual PD that combined asynchronous modules and synchronous collaborative sessions focused on evidence-based writing instruction. Teachers completed video-based situational simulations at three time points across the PD; responses were scored using a 5-point holistic scale to assess growth in pedagogical content knowledge. A post-workshop survey also asked teachers to rate prior use, anticipated implementation, and readiness to implement SIWI-aligned practices on a 3-point scale. Survey results indicated relatively low pre-workshop use of practices and higher anticipated implementation and readiness after PD. Repeated-measures analyses of simulation scores indicated significant improvement over time, reflecting strengthened ability to identify instructional priorities, integrate language and writing instruction, and justify responsive teaching decisions. To illustrate what this growth looked like in practice, the manuscript includes an embedded illustration of one teacher’s scenario responses across the three time points, showing a shift from more general/imprecise instructional commentary to more SIWI-aligned, objective-driven reasoning that explicitly links language supports to targeted writing instruction and next instructional steps. These findings suggest that video-based simulations offer a feasible, practice-oriented way to assess teacher learning in online PD, and that programs preparing teachers of deaf writers should pair self-report measures with simulation-based tasks that document how teachers apply pedagogical content knowledge to writing instruction.