What challenges did the students want to explore in their practising? In what follows, we provide a short outline of five different student’s practising challenges.

Student 1 was a classical flautist whose main goal was to become better at preparing for performances at auditions and performance exams. He reported to have benefitted the most from learning about mental practising strategies such as goal-setting, visualisation, and coping strategies, as he reported often feeling high performance pressure and anxiety.

Student 2 was a classical pianist who said he often felt high pressure related to performing, which caused him to rush when learning new pieces. This rush had led to physical strain. Before the course, he had already been testing a slower and more mindful approach to learning new pieces so that the process of practising had become a main goal in itself rather than the end goal of performance. In the practising workshop, he found himself giving others advice rather than learning from them.

Student 3 was a jazz singer who, early in the course, stated that she lacked motivation and had never practised because she didn’t know how to. At the beginning of the course, she did not think that exploration with voice and material qualified as practising. She redefined this view during the course through peer discussions, which led her to realise that developing ownership to practising improved both her motivation and her routines. As a result of this new perspective, she started to acknowledge exploration and “playing around” as valid practising activities.

Student 4 was a jazz double bass player. She had several goals in her development project. One goal was to improve her intonation, despite finding intonation practising boring. A motivating factor was to practise intonation with a fellow bass player, in what she called “buddy practising”. Another goal was to integrate improvisation approaches that were idiomatic with other instruments in her own bass playing. Although S4 had previously experienced peer learning through joint discussions in a free jazz trio she had played in, discussing individual practising with peers in the course was a new and positive experience.

Student 5 was a jazz guitarist who was used to both setting specific short-term goals and practising towards more general, long-term goals. Through the course, he applied structuring strategies, such as writing detailed notes on a range of skills that he wanted to improve. He claimed to be self-driven and highly motivated to practice. S5 found the discussions in the peer group motivating. This was not so much through a direct transfer of other students’ habits as how learning about the variety of different approaches validated him in finding the individual approach that worked best for him.