Teachers encounter immense variety in literary competence among students in their secondaryschool classrooms. Yet, little is known about how they perceive and deal with this variety. Moreover,little is known about the literary development that students undergo during their school career and thedifferent levels of development that can be identified. The aim of the present study is to design an instrumentthat can help to describe relevant differences in literary competence between students and tospecify the individual literary development process of students in upper secondary education (aged 15‐18). To tie in with teaching practice, we designed a research method by which we could explore theshared pedagogical content knowledge of a diverse group of six expert teachers. With the aid of questionnairesand panel discussions, data was collected on the following question: what does a studentwith a particular level of literary competence demonstrate with a particular literary text? The data analysisresulted in 14 indicators of literary competence which we then used to describe six successive competencelevels. These levels are validated by both developmental theory and the practice of literatureteaching