From a pragmatist standpoint, learning may be described as change in our habits to cope with some new –indeterminate? - situations we encounter. Dewey (1938) defines the scientific inquiry as “the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinction and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (p104-105). By extension, effective learning in classroom contexts may be associated with an active participation of the students into inquiry practices, problem solving, etc. However, the role of the teacher is hardly theorized in such approaches. In this paper, I examine under which conditions a pragmatist approach to learning may be used to understand what happens in the classroom (Wickman 2012). This issue will be examined in the light of certain French didactics frameworks, such as the didactic contract (Brousseau 1997) and the notion of didactical time worked by Mercier et al. (2005).