When learning a new piece of piano music, I always advise my students to break it into sections. With younger or less experienced students, I do this for them by marking out each ‘section’ for practice while over time more experienced students will do this frequently for themselves. By breaking a piece into sections, the student can concentrate on the part that is causing them difficulty without having to go over material already covered. This is one of my top tips and it sounds simple but honestly will save so much time. Taking a hard part a few bars at a time will make it so much easier to work with and learn instead of playing everything through and stumbling over the tough parts. Another thing I would advise is to take any mistakes or troublesome parts to the teacher – that is why I am here and the sooner these mistakes are corrected and explained the better. All of my students have a piano notebook and it can be useful for things like these. Students are best to set themselves small piano goals to keep them motivated to practice. If the goals are small and achievable, the student will get more out of practice time and feel better too. Do not spend too much time on a difficult part of a piece, either. If it really is challenging, set an amount of time like 20 minutes, work on it then come back to it in a few hours. Another tip before practice is do a few warm up exercises before you play. This could be some piano scales or some exercises like Czerny or Hanon.