What values guide physics teachers' decision-making in and out of the classroom?

Understanding why physics teachers make particular instructional decisions requires examining the curricular values that shape how they design, plan, and enact physics instruction. Co-design offers a space where physics teachers voice their opinions, surface tensions, and learn through dialogic engagement with others. In this talk, I show how teacher learning can occur through interactions during co-design and use the Curricular Values Framework (Pomian Bogdanov, 2022, 2025) to trace how physics teachers weigh disciplinary, pedagogical, and justice-oriented commitments across phases of curriculum work. Drawing on a multi-month OpenSciEd physics co-design project, I illustrate how teachers negotiate values during design discussions, especially through episodes of productive uncertainty that I call design dilemmas (Johnson et al., 2016; Penuel et al., 2022; Pomian Bogdanov, 2025). These moments reveal how teachers reason about scientific accuracy, coherence from the students' perspective, equity, engagement, and usability for teachers while working toward shared curricular decisions. I then trace how these same values shape physics teachers' planning for their own classrooms and the in-the-moment instructional decisions they make while teaching physics. Because curriculum materials are not neutral (Remillard, 2005), examining physics teachers' value-guided reasoning helps explain what content is emphasized, how phenomena are framed, and what instructional pathways are prioritized. By following teachers' decision-making across co-design, planning, and enactment, this work shows how curricular values function as a stable yet flexible anchor that teachers draw on to navigate the demands of reform-oriented physics instruction (National Research Council, 2012; NGSS, 2013). The talk concludes with implications for designing co-design and professional learning environments that intentionally surface, support, and build on physics teachers' curricular values as a core dimension of teacher learning and agency.