S5E33: Sean Morrisey on Word Mapping, Vocabulary Routines, and Durable Word Knowledge

Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell.

In this episode, I’m joined by Sean Morrisey, creator of the Word Mapping Project, for a conversation about how students learn words—not just as spellings to memorize or definitions to recite, but as connected units of sound, spelling, and meaning.

Sean spent eight years as a school psychologist before becoming a classroom teacher, and that background shapes the way he thinks about memory, retrieval, language, and comprehension. We talk about the classroom problems that led him to develop the Word Mapping Project, especially the challenge of students who can decode words but still struggle to understand and use them flexibly.

Sean walks us through what word learning looks like in practice, including word sums, matrices, prefixes, roots, suffixes, fluency passages, sentence composition, explicit instruction, retrieval practice, and independent practice. We also discuss where vocabulary instruction often goes wrong, why daily structure matters, and what kinds of evidence suggest that students are building word knowledge that lasts and transfers into reading, writing, science, and comprehension.

Last Call!

Love what you heard? Come to The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.

We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one. 

NYC | July 27–31, 2026

Learn more + register here: Explicit Teaching Institute registration 

Check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.

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