Trust the Students: Ken Long on Co-Creation and Hybrid Learning for Professional Traders

Ken's most significant shift was moving from delivering polished content to letting students shape the learning experience. He developed a "menu-style approach" where students self-assess their skill levels across an array of trading and thinking skills, then co-design courses tailored to their actual needs. "What I found is that when you incorporate students in the preparation phase for the actual design of the course, and having them specify what it is that they need, then you can actually tailor the delivery," he explains. He speaks less in the classroom and lets students take more initiative. His accountability partnering program -- small groups of two to four students who work through material informally without him present -- produced what he called their "most popular lesson." Students recorded a peer-to-peer session that was "better than anything I was giving them, if I'm gonna be completely honest." Danny observed that Ken has "really internalized the idea of co-creation with the student and everything that that entails" in a way that many educators talk about but few fully practice.

Ken structures every course around three phases: preparation, classroom, and follow-up. Before class, students do pre-work, self-assessments, and checks on learning that establish a baseline. During class, he builds in time for students to demonstrate mastery, use whiteboards, take the microphone, and create artifacts collaboratively. After class, he follows up in more structured ways than the watercooler conversations that happen naturally in person. "In a live setting you can talk at the coffee machine or linger after the class. That's not always easy online. So you have to build in follow-ups that will allow you to check in with them," he explains. Student-generated artifacts -- short written materials, mind maps, shared files -- have become a central part of his approach. These documents lock in learning and create a growing library of co-created knowledge.

Perhaps the most unexpected element of Ken's trading education is his use of "true storytelling," a technique developed by his doctoral mentor David Boje, the founder of the organizational storytelling discipline. The method leverages indigenous ways of knowing and emotional truth-telling. Ken discovered that the physical separation of online learning actually makes this deeper work easier: "The separation that you get in physical space allows us to feel a little more in control of what we present to new people. I can more carefully control how much of myself I want to reveal until I feel that we are building some collaboration." When he combines true storytelling and emotional intelligence work with technical trading instruction, the results are dramatically better. Professional traders -- people "wrapped pretty tight" who "really want value and know how to manage risk" -- have found that the human factors underlying technical performance are "absolutely essential for developing resiliency and courage and teamwork."