Two main aspects can characterise the education of pupils in a vocational school: a profession-oriented training and a reorganisation on a positive basis. The article tries to conceive situations for a holstic training which could allow the pupil to contract real problems, but – by way of symmetry – also to use profession-oriented situations for the development of competence for scientific analysis, and to make the ways in which knowledge can be acquainted more conscious. It presents a typology of activities, appropriate to model training situations as follows: profession-oriented problems (non didactic situation), classical school problems (didactic situation), open problems (a-didactic situation), situative problems (a-didactic situation), and « didactualised » situations. It describes, analyses and discusses these situations from a pedagogical and a sociological approach, referring to the categories form, pupils’ aim, teacher’s aim, pupils’ achievement, evaluation, teacher’s method and activity, pupils’ method and activity, and pupils’ attitude towards the situation. (ZDM/Mathdi)