From the Bookshelf: My thoughts on Regie Routman’s 2024 book The Heart Centered Teacher

Regie Routman’s The Heart Centered Teacher mixes memoir, up to date stories, and expert teacher advice providing a north star to the busy and stressed out teacher of 2025.

The last 12 months have been tremendously gratifying and validating for me as an educator. At year 7 in the field, I have my footing. So it was disorienting at the beginning of the 24-25 school year when classroom challenges soon had me spinning my proverbial wheels. I felt at times like I was trying to keep my head above water as I moved back to third grade in a new (to me) building. At one point, I was losing the joy of the classroom and doubting myself. Enter the voice of Regie Routman in The Heart Centered Teacher.

Regie has championed ideas around student centered learning for decades. Regie’s writing has influenced my wife, Melissa, who happened to be my primary tutor when I made a mid-life career change to the elementary classroom (almost a decade ago). 

Knowing that I needed some inspiration, I loaded up my audible app and purchased the book; I was delighted to hear Regie’s own voice narrating. I consumed the book in seasons as I was able, starting in October and finishing in January. 

Regie opens the book by sharing about recent reading instruction she provided for a relative, over the phone, during the pandemic. Her stories and advice through the narrative are timely. As Regie shares her experience help Ted learn to read, we are reminded of one of her core values: a student first approach that builds on strengths.

Along the journey, we get both brief glimpses and occasionally longer views of Regie’s own life as a teacher, but also as a daughter, a wife, and a mother. We hear multiple narratives throughout the book. We experience the arc of Regie’s life story, including the family she grew up in, her early married years, raising her children in an integrated neighborhood in Cleveland and her more recent years in the pacific northwest. She includes stories about her career, including how she got started in writing and publishing books as well as training and presenting to teachers. This book is a gem, with stories of love, stories of success, stories of frustration, and stories of heart-breaking loss. 

All of this, we see as the reader, through the lens of a heart centered teacher. Whatever your career, there are life lessons throughout this book. In education, we’d be wise to listen to the stories Regie shares as we consider the future of our schools, our students, and our profession. 

Here’s what I know: This past fall, I was becoming a teacher I didn’t want to be. I chose to open my ears, my mind, and my own heart to receive wisdom from an expert. Someone who believes that everyone’s story can be told. That every person is worthy of love and respect. Someone who believes that everyone can be a reader and a writer. Someone who believes that every child can succeed.

With Regie’s heart-centered-teacher voice in my ear on my early morning dog walks or throughout the day, my classroom was destined for a turnaround. Now, as we head into the last four weeks of our school year, I see Regie’s book as part of a turning point toward finding parts of my own teacher heart that had been misplaced or buried. As I look proudly upon the many (so many!) remarkable successes in my 9 year old students, I do so with thankfulness to Regie Routman for sharing her heart and her stories.