This article describes a collaboratively designed and delivered teaching and learning session where mental health nursing students met with a service-user educator after reading a range of research papers about recovery. They generated questions based on their reading and then explored the validity of the findings with a patient with experience of the services described in the literature. The authors explain the rationale for the session then reflect on the process and experience from three different perspectives, those of the service-user educator, two students and a nurse lecturer. The accounts confirm that this approach motivated the students to learn about recovery, the stigma of mental health illness, the realities of services and that all the participants found the sessions rewarding and beneficial.