Students' voice on literature teacher excellence: Towards a teacher-organized model of continuing professional development

This study contributes to the development of empirically based, domain-specific teaching standards in upper secondary education. It is part of a Dutch project to develop ecologically valid teaching standards and to find a teacher-organized model for continuing professional development. A previous study about teachers' perceptions of what constitutes an excellent teacher of literature resulted in a set of six domain-specific teaching standards. In this study, an exploratory factor analysis was performed to find out which dimensions or characteristics of an excellent teacher of literature could be gleaned from the students' perspective. We found four similar and two complementary dimensions.