This article draws on interviews with three music teachers. It is part of a larger study that explores improvisation in general music education in the Swedish school year 4. The article focuses teachers’ pedagogical approaches to improvisation and how this effect the teaching. This study reveal that music teachers incorporate improvisation in their teaching. They do, however, lack a professional language in order to reflect on content, methods, aim and purpose of improvisation in education. Through thematic analysis, we demonstrate that pedagogical points of departure and attitudes are implicitly present in the teachers’ practices and have implications for their educational orientation. Three diverse but overlapping educational orientations are discerned: a process-oriented, a subject-oriented and a Bildung-oriented. The educational orientations are reflected in these teachers’ approaches to improvisation and are related to pedagogical choices of activities, how activities are conducted and to what aim.