Let's say your schola knows how to read square notation, can support their voices properly, and demonstrates an eagerness to learn new chants. How does your schola learn these new chants? What are the best group-learning strategies?

I'll throw out a few strategies, but I'm sure there are more:

1. Sing the Gloria Patri to the chant's associated psalm tone. This establishes the sound of the chant's mode.
2. Sing the incipit to the asterisk. Do it until you are totally confident about it.
3. Then sing one word at a time, repeating as necessary to build confidence. Circle any groups of three. Practice word by word until the end of a grammatical unit, then sing the entire unit as a whole. Pause to reflect on any relationships between text and music.
4. Take the same approach for the next major grammatical unit.
5. Then sing the chant as a whole.
6. Subsequently, focus only on areas of difficulty.
7. Once the notes and basic communicative approach are in place, sing the chant sincerely as a prayer.

In subsequent practices, focus only on areas of difficulty and iron them out until everyone is confident. Remember that you have other chants to learn and have to be efficient!

Our schola has good readers, so we actually don't take the word-by-word approach initially: we just sing the psalm tone, sing the chants through (even the Graduals), pause along the way to iron out any kinks that arise, and then keep singing them through until they gel.

I'm wondering if there are better ways to learn these more florid chants, actually. How do people break down the long melismas into coherent musical parts? Do you learn them as such? How do you approach those long stretches with their frequent repercussions and repetitions?