Being questioned and challenged by your pupils may sound like a nightmare lesson to many teachers. However, at A level, this is exactly the classroom culture that teachers should be encouraging.

If you are new to teaching this age group, it can feel like an intimidating change to invite students to question you - and each other. Yet helping students to develop the confidence needed to form and express their opinions will allow them to become passionate about the topics they study and to engage fully with your subject.

With that in mind, here are five essentials for effective A-level teaching. My subject is history, but these pointers should apply to most other subjects, too.

Tips for teaching A level

1. Ring-fence time to respond to feedback

If you want students to progress, you need to designate time for them to respond to your feedback. This applies to students of all ages, but is particularly true at A level.

At my school, A-level history students have nine lessons across a fortnight and one of these is always designated to improving essay skills. In this session, students respond to feedback on an essay they have recently received. This might involve rewriting the introduction to be more assertive, improving the opening sentences of paragraphs to advance an argument or including more precise detail to make their argument more convincing.

This process also requires teachers to have expert subject knowledge and a thorough understanding of what good history writing is.

2. Focus on the argument

In my subject, it is essential that students express their opinions clearly in essays and that there is no “sitting on the fence”. This is not just good history writing, but is also specifically required by the exam boards. Sustaining an argument over the course of an essay is probably the most difficult skill for students to master, but it is worth the time spent developing it.

Students should clearly and confidently state their argument in the introduction and sustain it throughout the essay. One approach we have introduced is planning the essay backwards. This requires students to know their argument before putting pen to paper and we ensure that every paragraph comes back to the argument, even when providing the counter-argument. We still encourage the use of other interpretations in essays but they are purely there to support an argument, or to be challenged by the student.

3. Know your exam inside out

This is vital for every teacher of A Level. It sounds obvious, but you really must know the requirements for the highest levels on each paper. Frequent moderation of essays during department meetings can be highly effective with this. Going to exam board CPD meetings are also effective as you can question the chief examiners yourself. However, with increasing cuts to budgets you may find CPD webinars to be just as effective - my department certainly has.

One powerful way to ensure that all members of the department understand the requirements of the exam is to recall scripts and mark them together, before telling them the actual grade awarded. Students can take part in this process in lessons, too. You should simplify mark schemes for them and share the important points from examiners reports.

4. Encourage further reading (and viewing)

Moving beyond the textbook is essential at A Level. I remember being part of a CPD webinar where a teacher questioned why there was a question in the exam focusing on a topic which was only covered by half a page in the textbook. The chief examiner for the board replied: “Students should be doing further reading.”

In our lessons, we therefore provide book boxes filled with texts for further reading. Reading around the subject at home is a requirement of the course, not a suggestion. It is so important that students engage with the historians to help formulate their own arguments and develop a passion for the topics they are studying. It is also important for students to see the historian’s craft: how do historians start their paragraphs? What is the most convincing evidence they used in that extract? What has the historian left out?

To add variety, we also suggest documentaries and films that are available on catch-up services or streaming services such as Netflix.

5. Teach enquiry-led lessons

In my experience, there is very little guidance given on teacher training courses for A Level teaching. This can result, understandably, in teachers playing it safe by keeping rigorously to the textbook and ensuring that all the content is covered. Enquiry lessons, just as they would at key stage 3 and 4, often result in far higher engagement from the students and require a higher level of thinking as students are encouraged to form an opinion.

For example, some of our recent enquiries include: “Could the Holocaust have happened without Hitler?” and “Can we learn anything about modern Europe from the rise of fascism 1918-1933?”

Again, this does rely on teachers being well-read on the topics being studied, but the benefits are immense.

Dan Kneller is second in department and subject lead for A-level history at Bay House School in Gosport