A Roomful of Innovation

Sammanfattning: Being a teacher at the university level can be experienced as complex, especially when it comes to interacting with a large number of students. The teacher is also a crucial underlying factor in the students' performance, even though higher-level studies are more aimed at self-studies. In addition, the interaction between teachers and students is also a proven important factor for students' performance. Based on the aforementioned, this qualitative study has aimed to investigate how teachers, nominated by their students for the award "Teacher of The Year", experience the interaction process from a leadership perspective. The thesis is based on thirteen interviews with award-winning teachers and the interactive part of the transformative leadership theory. The findings from the cross-sectional study show which aspects of the theoretical framework are most significant: interactive and empowering. The empirical material also points to an additional aspect, availability, as an essential but limiting factor for the exercise of interactive teacher-leadership. This thesis contributes to an increased understanding of how teachers can manage the interaction process at the university level in Sweden, where the number of recipients is extensive, contributing to the students' performance. This is because the thesis aims to reduce the perceived difficulty for teachers to interact with students due to them being a large number of recipients.