Criteria approach contributes to the implementation of diagnostic, research, monitoring, formative, analytical and other functions of assessing the effectiveness of pedagogical phenomena and components of the pedagogical process. The idea of the study is to develop scientific and pedagogical foundations — the main provisions that scientifically and methodically detail the processes of organization and formation of general professional competencies of a future history teacher. The article says that the learning process is traditional, characterized by the widely used lecture-seminar form of training, when the material is presented by the lecturer to students, and then fixed in the seminar–practical classes, despite the variety of different types of lectures: introductory, problem, overview, etc. , nevertheless, the main drawback is the active position of the lecturer in the form of a monologue and the passive position of the student, who is not fully included in the learning process. The least effective form of training is a lecture, because the student simply listens and is able to remember only 10% of everything he has heard, but the most effective form of training, in our opinion, is group interaction of students, during which students interact, analyze, develop, discuss, evaluate, argue, which allows them to learn 90% new material. As part of the experimental and pedagogical work of the study, professional–basic and professional–profile types of practices were visited in order to identify student’s understanding of the essence of the content of the lessons, the essence of understanding its structure, the correct use of didactic principles, and school teachers were observed and questioned. In relation to our subject of research, the criteria-based approach allowed us to formulate a development strategy for the formation of general professional competencies, to assess the correspondence between the goals set and the results obtained, to optimize the processes that contribute to the effective formation of general professional competencies of future teachers.