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 … Continue reading 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.
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