My son went to Kindergarten this year. He’s doing all the things I figured he would: math, reading, gym, music, art, recess, and the library. Once upon a time, I was a substitute teacher in K-12, and so I had a passing familiarity with kids’ worksheets. But this is the first time I have been a parent of a school-age child. Suddenly those worksheets he brings home are vastly more interesting to me. Looking over the exercises, I am reminded of the importance of the presentation of information; that is, how the instruction is designed for his developing brain to grasp what are sometimes difficult concepts, without making the tasks seemingly too difficult for him. We have all heard someone tell us to “take it slowly” when we are learning something new, or to make “baby steps” toward completing a larger goal. In a nutshell, these are some of the basic concepts in Cognitive Load Theory.
This year for my conference choice I picked 
No matter what you may have planned, or how cool or timely it may be, or how exactly it may fit into the material you had planned to cover that day, you’re going to run into a situation where something goes awry. Perhaps it’s a technology issue at work, and that great piece of software you were going to demo just isn’t going to work on the classroom computer. Could be that for some reason, half the class just didn’t participate in the online exercise you had so meticulously planned. What if you have been assuming that an exercise was going to go one way, only to find that it has gone in a completely unanticipated direction?
