The best prompt includes three things: a detailed description of your audience, the concept you need an example for, and the emotional context you want the example to evoke. The more specific those three inputs, the more usable the example you get back.
Why Most AI Examples Miss the Mark
When you ask AI for “a teaching example about [topic],” you get a generic one. Generic examples do not land with adult learners who have spent 20 or 30 years in a specific professional context. They feel like they were written for someone else — because they were. The fix is not a better AI tool. It is a better prompt.
Adult learners respond to examples that reflect their actual life experience: career transitions, managing teams, building client relationships, dealing with technology they did not grow up with, balancing a business with a family. When an example hits one of those contexts, the room changes. People stop scrolling and start listening.
The Prompt That Works for Adult Learners
Use this template in Claude: “I need a teaching example that illustrates [concept]. My audience is [description — age, profession, life stage, goals]. The example should make them feel [emotion — validated, challenged, hopeful, seen]. Use a scenario from [context — running a small business, a career transition, managing a team, building something new after 50]. Keep it to three sentences: the situation, the moment of recognition, and the outcome.” That structure produces examples with emotional specificity that generic prompting cannot reach.
Run the same prompt two or three times and pick the one that feels most real. Different runs produce different scenarios, and the best one is usually the one that makes you think “I have seen that exact situation in my students.”
What This Means for Educators
A great example does something a great explanation cannot — it makes the learner feel understood before they have learned anything. That emotional connection is what opens people up to learning. Adult learners in particular bring their whole identity into a classroom. When your example honours that identity, they trust you more. When it ignores it, they mentally leave the room.
The Bottom Line
Save your best working prompt as a template and reuse it for every lesson. Swap in the concept, the emotion, and the context each time. After a few iterations you will have a personal example-generation prompt that produces usable results on the first try, every time.