Personally, I wouldn't "improvise" at all. Sit down and work something out beforehand. Work at it long enough and you can develop a selection of licks that work at various places throughout the changes, but you shouldn't be trying to marry theory and technique when playing it live.
You'd be surprised at how far you can get with the right pentatonic, even in jazz format. So I'd take your teacher's advice on that. What you should do, however, is to look at how you can augment the pentatonic with some extra chord tones thrown in to keep it sounding "jazzy".
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