Letting students get you off track

One of the things I have seen happen to novice teachers, myself included, is letting the students derail your lesson by taking it off topic. Once the students figure out how to do this, it may be difficult to bring things back around without wasting valuable class time.

When I was student teaching, my class quickly learned that I liked to see them asking questions, so they would keep asking question after question to prevent me from getting back to my lesson. When they asked questions, I felt like they were engaging with the material. As a result, I wound up entertaining increasingly off-topic, and sometimes ridiculous, questions. I didn't realize what was happening until I found myself seriously responding to, "What if the pope was an alien?" and it occurred to me that this wasn't the first time I had diverged from the lesson to answer an insane question that took the class down a black hole.

I announced that there would be no more stupid questions or something to that effect. This produced the undesired result of shutting them up and making them skittish about asking legitimate questions for fear of being seen as stupid. My next solution was to put a paper on each student's desk before they arrived. I told them to write down any questions they had, even off-topic questions, and I would pick out the best ones and answer them. I thought that this would help me weed out the distracting questions and keep the questions I wanted to be getting. Instead they just ignored the paper and mostly asked nothing. Looking back, a way to make the paper-on-the-desk concept work might be to assign some class participation points to it or make it an exit ticket assignment to ask at least one question about the lesson.

What I ended up doing, to some success, is I went back to encouraging students to raise their hand to ask questions, but when I felt a question was silly, facetious, or just off-topic, I would say, "We can talk after class about that if you want." It worked because once the students who wanted to derail my lesson realized that asking off-topic questions would no longer work, they gave up.

I'm not sure that this was the optimal solution to the problem though. I'd be interested in hearing from any one else who has dealt with this issue.