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This paper presents the importance of professional development for teachers in Al-Buraq School for Basic Education and to what extent it plays a vital role in improving their teaching and performance. Studying this topic is a way to figure out teachers’ attitudes towards professional development and the change it might cause to affect their behaviors and beliefs about gaining new skills, methods, strategies of effective teaching. “Teacher development is a professional growth a teacher achieves as a result of gaining increased experience and examining his or his teaching systematically” (Glathorn, 1995). To do this project we found ourselves totally surrounded with different types of teachers: teachers who are highly motivated, passionate and strongly enthusiastic to the work, teachers who lack motivation, and teachers who are relatively motivated to the teaching profession in different ways. A questionnaire was used to collect data about this subject. Teachers participated fully in answering the required information within the limited time. Accordingly, the questionnaires have been analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) program version 19. The results are shown in the tables below and it showed that teachers have really positive attitudes towards continuing their professional development. In addition, we came up with great evidences of the necessity of top management supports for training courses. It also emphasizes that there is a real significant relationship between professional development courses and learners’ outcomes.

The reality of learning a language is that students are diverse in terms of capability to grasp the language lessons given. Cognitive development, socio-cultural background, gender, motivation are a few factors that affect their ability to learn a target language. Thus, this paper is concerned about the effectiveness of Differentiated Instructions (DI) in catering low proficiency students so that they could excel in their ESL writing tasks and their perceptions of DI in improving their writing skills. A study was conducted in a sub urban primary school in Sandakan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. There were 29 respondents altogether from a class of Standard 4 which are categorized as low proficiency students based on their LINUS results in the previous year. The data were collected using mixed methods and, an analysis and discussion about the effectiveness of DI were done by comparing students’ pre-test and post-test scores and their perceptions towards DI were concluded from the interview and observations throughout the study. A questionnaire adapted from VARK questionnaire version 7.0 was used to determine students’ learning preferences before they were divided into three groups to undergone the DI strategies. The results of the study show there are some improvements in students’ writing as shown in the post-test results. Their behaviours in writing classes also have changed from being anxious to being confident at the end of the study. In general, it seems that DI could be used as one of the approach to help primary schools’ students to excel their ESL writing lessons. Besides, teachers should also take into consideration of implementing DI not only for writing skills but also other language skills.