This article centers on the question of to what extent school students orient their behavior in art classes toward the anticipated evaluation of the artworks they produce. The teaching unit Ritterspiele is analyzed based on the observations of three student teachers who sat in during lessons based on this unit. Drawing on their own experiences of school, the student teachers reconstruct the effect of being evaluated on the aesthetic behavior of the school students, highlighting the connection between retrospective observation and prospective action in planning their own future art lessons. Particular attention is paid to the school students’ performative interaction with an image from the Renaissance, with the student teachers observing how mimetically enacted imagined gestures are playfully inscribed into the resulting artworks. This process is described as a transition from image reception to image production. Held in the framework of a so-called network event at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), the mind the gap workshops presented in the eJournal 28 take up and deepen these observations. Here, student teachers test out aesthetic actions using anonymized artworks by school students, reflecting on the interplay between artistic practice, image impact, and evaluative processes in art education.