I do feel, most sincerely, that constant practice is pushed too much to the exclusion of all other considerations.
It is necessary, IMHO, to develop the skills of thinking too in order to gain and sustain situational awareness. That is why I personally advocate the student learns the discipline to brief himself or herself prior to getting to the flight school - by this I mean thinking through the impending flight, anticipating where and how the flight will be conducted, navigation and vertical navigation, looking at the charts (even when in the circuit: one sees other features outside the circuit).
Then the student meets his instructor, hopefully the instructor will provide a briefing for the flight which now the student can synthesize with his own.
The flight can then be conducted with the student comparing flight progress with his mental image of the flight. This will make the inculcation of gaining situational awareness, ultimately as an automatic process, easier.
For maximum effectiveness, after the instructor's post-flight briefing, and preferably away from the airfield, the student can think through the actual progress of the flight, and make mental notes of what went well, what was uncertain, and what went badly, to inform his subsequent forays in the air.
This adoption of a mental discipline, of a way of thinking is not, so far as I know, taught in all training organisations. I suggest it should be. As a musician this is the way that I have come most effectively to learn. I do not believe the analogy, though imperfect, to be entirely devoid of merit, since, on the face of it, both flying and being an instrumentalist are activities with a high practical content.
Pending the universal adoption of this discipline in the teaching of flying skills, however, it should not be beyond the wit of an aspirant pilot to do this for themselves. Since they can do it for themselves, they should do it immediately.