RES 6302 Module 1 Defense Presentation Outline Example

Twenty Minutes, Fourteen Slides: Outlining the Dissertation Defense for a Study of Why Hospital Revenue Cycle Staff Speak Up

Student Name

American College of Education

RES6302: Defending the Dissertation

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 12, 2026

Introduction

My dissertation is finished: five chapters reporting that, among 221 hospital revenue cycle employees, supervisors seen as more transformational were associated with more employee voice, largely through team psychological safety. The defense is the last step, and it has a different purpose from the document. The committee has read the dissertation; the presentation must show that I understand the study well enough to explain it briefly, defend its choices and say plainly what it does and does not show. This paper outlines that presentation before any slide is built, because a defense that starts with slide design tends to become a tour of the chapters rather than an argument.

The Time Budget

The defense is scheduled for an hour, with about twenty minutes for my presentation, thirty for committee questions and ten for the committee's private deliberation. Twenty minutes is far less than the material available, so the budget is set first and the content second. The plan allots two minutes to the problem and why it matters, three to the literature and framework, four to the method, six to the results, four to interpretation, limitations and recommendations and one to the closing message. Results receive the largest share because they are the study's contribution and the place committee questions most often begin. The method receives more time than many students give it because the committee will judge whether the results can be trusted, and that judgment depends on the design.

What to Leave Out

Most of the dissertation will not appear on a slide. The literature review shrinks to three sources the findings speak to most directly: Edmondson (1999) on team safety, Detert and Burris (2007) on leader behavior and voice and Morrison (2014) on why employees speak up or stay silent. Data screening, missing values and reliability statistics are covered in one sentence and kept on a backup slide. The descriptive comparisons across systems and roles appear only if a question raises them. The test for each piece of content is whether a committee member would be confused about the argument without it; if not, it moves to a backup slide or stays in the document. This is uncomfortable, since much of the work of a dissertation lies in exactly the parts that get cut, but committees rarely fault a presenter for omitting detail they have already read.

The Four Acts

The presentation is organized in four acts. The first, the problem, explains that revenue cycle staff often see costly problems first and that problems nobody mentions cannot be fixed. The second, the approach, introduces the framework linking leadership, safety and voice and the survey design used to test it. The third, the findings, presents the three research questions and their answers, building to the indirect effect through safety. The fourth, the meaning, interprets the findings, states the limits on what they show and gives recommendations. Each act ends with a one-sentence summary on its last slide, so that a committee member who drifts briefly can rejoin the argument at the next act.

Slide Plan

Fourteen slides carry the twenty minutes. Act one has three: a title slide, a slide showing what revenue cycle staff see that others do not and a slide stating the problem and purpose. Act two has three: the framework diagram, the research questions and a design slide covering sample, measures and analysis. Act three has four: participants, the leadership-voice result, the leadership-safety result and the mediation figure with the indirect effect and its interval. Act four has four: interpretation against prior studies, limitations ranked by importance, recommendations for leaders and researchers and a closing slide with the single message of the study. Every slide has a sentence headline stating its point, not a topic label, so that the headlines read in order tell the story.

One Message Per Slide

For each slide I wrote the single message it must leave before deciding what goes on it. For the mediation slide, the message is that most of the link between leadership and voice runs through safety. For the limitations slide, it is that the study shows association, not sequence. For the closing slide, it is that a supervisor's reaction to a raised problem may count for as much as any vision statement. Writing these messages first exposed two planned slides that had no message of their own, one listing all control variables and one summarizing the literature review, and both were removed.

Opening and Closing

The first and last minute deserve more planning than their length suggests. The opening will not begin with my name and the title, which are on the screen already, but with a single concrete case: a coder who noticed a payer quietly changing a modifier rule and said nothing for three weeks because the last person who questioned a process had been told to focus on productivity. That composite story, drawn from patterns I have seen rather than from any participant, frames the study's question in thirty seconds. The close returns to the same coder and asks what would have made speaking up feel safe, then states the study's single message. Opening and closing on the same image gives the committee a frame for everything between.

Visual Standards

All slides will share one template with large type, no more than thirty words of text and one visual per slide. Statistics on screen will be rounded to two decimals and accompanied by a plain-language label, such as about 60% of the association, so that committee members outside quantitative methods can follow. Figures from the dissertation will be redrawn at presentation scale rather than pasted from the document. Every slide will carry a small slide number to make questions easier to locate.

Backup Slides

Ten backup slides are prepared but will be shown only if a question calls for them: the participant flow from 241 started surveys to 221 cases, reliability and descriptive statistics, the full regression table, residual diagnostics and the robust re-estimates, the two sensitivity analyses, the comparisons across systems and roles, the power analysis, the survey items, the ethics procedures and the revised model proposed for future research. Having these ready allows a short, confident answer followed by evidence on screen.

Rehearsal Plan

The presentation will be rehearsed four times: once alone with a timer, once recorded and watched back, once for two doctoral colleagues who will interrupt with questions and once for my chair. Each rehearsal will be timed by act so that overruns can be traced to a specific section. The target is to finish in eighteen minutes, leaving a margin for nerves and for the technical delays common in video defenses.

Conclusion

The defense outline sets a time budget that gives results and method the most attention, cuts material that does not serve the argument, organizes fourteen slides into four acts with sentence headlines and one message each and prepares backup slides and rehearsals. Module 2 builds the findings slides and their speaker notes.

References

Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869-884. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 173-197. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091328