Any aesthetic engagement with the work of school students is always also a process of self-reflection and professional development. By entering into a dialog with the artistic-aesthetic products and processes of students’ work, teachers not only gain a deeper understanding of their achievements but also become more aware of their own attitudes when evaluating and appreciating this work. With this in mind, four workshops were developed for the mind the gap network event in which different media were used to open up a space for the shared observation and analysis of anonymized artworks by school students: speech, painting/drawing, writing, and AI-tools. Materials taken from art lessons thus served as the starting point for an aesthetic dialog that is simultaneously differentiated and emotional, artistic and aesthetic, enabling answers to central questions regarding the profession and didactics of art education. Instead of viewing students from a purely reception-aesthetic perspective – with the focus on perception and evaluation – the workshops foregrounded the aesthetics of production, with the student teachers formulating their own artistic responses to what they saw. These aesthetic responses mirror the teachers’ reception of the students’ works while at the same time also opening up a new and creative form of understanding and reflection.