This interactive workshop explores how improvisation games can serve as pedagogical tools in music teacher education to cultivate what we call an improvisatory stance: an orientation to teaching grounded in presence, listening, adaptability, and ethical responsiveness to context and identity. Drawing from experiences teaching pre-service music educators and community musicians, we ask how we might best prepare future educators if we understand the classroom as a site of social negotiation and co-creation?Participants will engage in improvisation games—from the noisier towards the more musical—that we use with teacher candidates to disrupt hierarchical models of teaching, encourage attunement to sonic and social dynamics, and expand notions of engagement beyond Western art music norms. These games—drawing from the practices and frameworks of Oliveros (2004, 2005, 2013, Schafer (1992, 1993), Boal (1992), Lewis (1996, 2014), Eshun (1996), Ranciere (2010)—foreground collective exploration over individual performance, emphasizing process, curiosity, vulnerability, and relationality.Improvisation is often undervalued in formal music education, yet it offers a generative way to reimagine teaching and learning. As we introduce these games, we invite participants to reflect on implications for teacher preparation: How might engaging with structured and free improvisation support students’ development as responsive, reflective practitioners? How do these practices unsettle the hidden curriculum (Apple, 1979/2004) and make space for understanding of and presence in the lived curriculum (Aoki, 2004), where teaching is not just what we plan, but how we and our students are and wish to be?Framing improvisation as both practice and orientation, we connect our work to broader themes in music education research—particularly inquiry-as-stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), listening pedagogies (Schultz, 2003), and abolitionist and anti-colonial critiques of conventional education (Love, 2019; Grande, 2015) . In the spirit of ISME 2026’s call to reimagine music education through equity, innovation, and inclusion, we suggest that an improvisatory stance in music teacher education allows for an embodied practice of the complex social and structural negotiations of teaching: the planning, replanning, reacting, sidestepping, encouraging, U-turning, and attunement that should be a part of our educational interactions. This workshop is open to researchers and educators across contexts. No instruments or improvisation experience are required—just a willingness to participate, reflect, and engage in sonic play.Participants will leave with:A set of adaptable improvisation activities for teacher education settingsTheoretical frameworks for understanding improvisation as a pedagogical orientationNew questions for rethinking curriculum, authority, and identity in music education