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What happened next offered an astonishing lesson in developing an emotionally charged event.
What does the PP go with, does it act as an ADJ to add extra information to the noun lesson,
or does it act as an ADV to add information to the verb offered?
One might say that it is adding information to the noun lesson. Grammatically, syntactically, that's what it's doing. It is an adjectival phrase applied to that noun.
However, it's actually much more important to the meaning of the sentence than the word lesson.
It might be rephrased as
What happened next was astonishing, and taught a lot about developing an emotionally charged event.
So, yes, it's an adjectival phrase, but don't let that minimise its semantic importance.
You might or might not already appreciate this, but for the benefit of other site users, I just wanted to point out how this is a very good example that sometimes the principal verb (here offered), and subject and object nouns, contribute a lot less to the substance of a sentence than a prepositional phrase, an adverbial, or various other less-grammatically-essential elements.
What happened next offered an astonishing lesson [in developing an emotionally charged event].
No, the bracketed PP does not function as an AdjP, but as complement of "lesson". We know that the PP is construction with "lesson" since the whole NP forms a constituent, compare [an astonishing lesson in developing an emotionally charged event] was offered by what happened next, where the bracketed NP is subject.
The head of the PP is "in", which has the gerund-participial clause "developing an emotionally charged event" as its complement.
