Yes — AI is genuinely good at writing discussion questions, but the ones that spark real conversation in a live session need a specific structure. The trick is asking AI to write questions that have no single right answer and require students to draw on their own experience.
Why Most Discussion Questions Fall Flat
There’s a big difference between a question that gets answered and a question that starts a conversation. “What is a learning objective?” gets answered and dies. “When have you sat through a lesson that had a clear objective but still felt pointless?” opens up a room. The first has a textbook answer. The second requires someone to think, remember, and share something real.
AI can write both types, but it defaults to the first unless you push it. Most basic prompts produce informational questions — the kind that work fine in a quiz but go silent in a Zoom room. Once you know that, you can give AI the right instructions and get something your students will actually engage with.
How to Prompt AI for Live Session Questions
The key is telling AI what kind of response you want from your students. Try: “Write five discussion questions for educators on the topic of AI in teaching. Each question should have no single right answer, require personal experience to answer, and be comfortable for beginners to respond to.” That’s it. You’ve removed the textbook answer, you’ve invited personal experience, and you’ve lowered the barrier to speak.
You can also ask AI to write questions at different levels — warm-up questions that anyone can answer, mid-session questions that require some thought, and closing questions that invite reflection on what changed during the session. Claude and ChatGPT both handle this well when you frame it that way. Run the output through your own knowledge of your audience and trim anything that feels too abstract or too advanced for where your students are right now.
What This Means for Educators
As a coach or trainer running live Zoom sessions, your biggest challenge isn’t content — it’s silence. When you ask a question and nobody responds, the energy drops fast. Good discussion questions are your insurance against that. AI can generate a bank of ten to fifteen options in about two minutes, so you always have more than you need. You pick the three that fit that day’s energy and your students’ level, and you leave the rest for another session.
This works especially well in FluentCommunity spaces too. Discussion prompts for your community feed follow the same logic — open-ended, experience-based, and easy to respond to without feeling like you’re being tested.
The Simple Rule
Ask AI to write questions your students can answer from their own experience, not from a textbook. That one instruction changes everything. Once you build a habit of generating questions this way before each session, you’ll stop dreading the awkward silence and start looking forward to where the conversation goes.