There I am, sitting in front of two piles of paper. On my left, the handwritten notes and Banda sheets from my PGCE studentship, 32 years ago; to my right, a pile of shiny KS3 English strategy folders and the documentation for the PGCE course which I now run. The piles are a keyboard’s width apart, the distance of a lifetime’s teaching, the span of an educational revolution.

Let me shock my friends and some of my former colleagues. Things are much better now. I couldn’t have said that a year ago, but I can say it now with conviction - because my students and I are following an intelligently structured course, informed by a clear rationale, and supported by truckloads of good materials. We know what we’re doing and why. In our placement schools, English departments are coming to terms with the key stage 3 strategy, the framework, the whole apparatus of Ofsted. Some are committed to the new; some are subverting it by “being flexible”. But it doesn’t matter: the critical examination of practice is making us better teachers and, whether we are university tutors or school mentors, better partners in promoting trainees’ learning.

Try this, from “Preparation of Lesson Notes”, 1969. “There is a broad aim for all English lessons: to help children to express themselves more flexibly and precisely and to help deepen their response to words. Thinking and feeling are close pointers in English lessons.” (Note that word, “children” - not “pupils”. Very telling.) There are more precise aims. The exemplar suggests this: “Aim: To study chapter of Treasure Island.” But you will search in vain for objectives, any statements of what we expect pupils to learn. There are notes on procedure and a couple of teaching points that specify content, but that’s it. It’s strong on guiding teacher activity, but thin when it comes to the rigorous promotion of learning.

I found a lesson plan of my own, based on this formula. It was written towards the end of my eight-week practice for the visit of an external examiner. You’d expect it to be carefully prepared and sharp. And by the standards of the day, it was. It was at least good enough to leave my visitor well pleased. Actually, though, it’s appalling. It is vague, self-indulgent and patronising. It purports to be the outline of a poetry lesson. In fact, it is a rambling justification of the choice of (wholly unsuitable) materials, with little sense of structure, pace, variety or purpose. It is cunning, though. And it contains a masterly explanation of the lesson’s precise relationship to the Piagetian stage of conceptual development its victims had reached. Indeed, that is the nub of it. Teacher training used to be an academic discipline. There was a nod to practicality here and there, and a bit of observation, enlivened by such high points as the notice in one grammar school: “Now that it is time to write reports, all staff are reminded that the use of Biro is the prerogative of the Headmaster”). And eight weeks in school (it’s 120 days now). The rest of our time was filled by lectures and seminars in the history, sociology, philosophy, and psychology of education. We could talk the talk, certainly. Did anyone ever teach you that John Milton’s view of the goal of learning was “to repair the ruins of our first parents”?

Classroom experience felt like an add-on. In school, our competence was assumed from the beginning. No one interfered with us once we had shown that we weren’t actively provoking riots, and we were valued primarily for providing our our supervising teachers with a break from the classroom. It wasn’t too difficult in a rural girls’ secondary modern with no external examination courses in English.

My 1969 peer group was a mixed bag of graduates, and our shared motivation was the desire to be students for another year. Now my trainees are passionate and well motivated to become teachers, and only a few are fresh from university. I have a systems analyst, a New Age therapist, a housing officer-cum-motorbike instructor, a writer, a librarian, an editor. They know what they want and why they are on the course.

The standards have mapped the content for us, and the piles of national curriculum, framework and KS3 strategy materials offer a solid conceptual structure. Perhaps because they’re used to business procedures, my trainees don’t see the monumental documentation as restrictive. They’ve internalised it quickly and use it for support. Their lesson plans are tight, well structured and full of pace and interest, with clear and justifiable objectives. They have already built working relationships with their school mentors. Four weeks into their course, they know more about teaching than I did at the end of mine. They are well on the way to becoming critical, reflective practitioners - and that’s something that took me years.

Harry Dodds is a senior lecturer with responsibility for the PGCE secondary English course at the Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes University