This paper explores the nurse lecturer’s role in providing educational support to both students and mentors across a variety of health and social care placements, within the acute and community care settings. Learning sets were established to bring students and mentors together to reflect on and discuss their experience. Formal and informal evaluation of these prompted analysis of ‘the way we were working’ to share learning. How, for instance, was “a chat” (the mentors words) about what had been experienced that day, or that week, being focused to help the students see exactly what and how much they were learning. The intention was to capture the ‘lived experience’ of the students’, mentors’ and lecturer learning together rather than the analysis being driven by the theoretical premises that dominate current literature. The use of the learning sets as a means to facilitate shared learning through focused conversations reflecting on recent practice events was well supported in the analysis. Key themes were identified i.e. what is nursing and what are nursing skills. This influenced how the NMC (2004) proficiencies were being interpreted. The role of the lecturer was supported as a facilitator of learning, to encourage the students and mentors to ‘teach back’ what was being learnt in practice (Laurillard 2002, Pask 1961). The author, mentors and students appeared to be modelling situated learning through the creation of shared learning between common “communities of practice” (Wenger and Lave 1991).