Katherine Bitney's first teaching experience was at the age of six. According to her mother, she taught her younger sister to read before she went into grade one. Katherine also taught herself to skate at six and to write poetry and drama in her teens.

She considers her years as child-raiser to be years of learning how to teach. They were invaluable. One is always flying by the seat of one’s pants. Let no one, therefore, discount the importance and value of child rearing as teaching experience.

One teaches by example, one teaches by sharing information, by asking questions, by discipline. By repetition, by making mistakes. By infecting another with one’s enthusiasm. By humour. By not lying to the student, and by giving praise where it is warranted, and not when it is not warranted.

One also teaches through one’s artistic output, whether poetry, paintings, drama, music.

Katherine’s philosophy of teaching creative writing is that one cannot teach other people to write, nor to be creative, but can only guide them to developing and honing the skills of writing craftsmanship. One can give them a starting place to open the imagination. One can help them improve language skills, give them writing exercises and exhort them to read and listen to other writers. One can encourage them to take risks. One can teach them how to critique and edit their own work. The rest is practice, practice, practice.

She does not judge genre – for example, a good science fiction or fantasy novel is good writing a well-written autobiography is good writing and so on. Rather, her judgement is on effectiveness of the craft in presenting the story, the poem, the play and so on.

She encourages writers to read their own work aloud, so they can put an actual voice to their written words. Working with critique and editing also teaches students how to develop their own “inner critic” or editor, such that they can edit themselves, and judge their own material. This she considers to be crucial to developing as a writer.